On girlhood and GIRLHOOD
content notes: dieting & weight stuff, body stuff, self harm, suicide, sexual assault
When I was ten – or possibly even younger, but definitely at or before the age of ten – I was in the playground with some other girls – not friends, not quite, but not enemies. One of them told me that they had a club, and I wasn’t in it. Their club was an exercise club: they were trying to lose weight, because they all weighed over 5 stone. I was not allowed to join because I was skinny, and therefore didn’t weigh enough.
This was, as far as I can remember, my first encounter with the weight loss industrial complex – ten year olds marching around the school field, because they already believe their bodies to be wrong. I imagine anyone who was socialised as a girl has stories like this – and that many of them are worse than mine, because my skinniness was a kind of salvation. I was not told, not then, that my body was wrong – only introduced to the idea that it could be. I know many other children have much younger and more violent first encounters with “body image”, an innocuous and somewhat shallow term for something which is anything but innocuous, anything but shallow.
From that point on, my adolescence was marked by this knowledge – that there are right bodies and wrong bodies. That a body can be a traitor, a weapon. Bodies are integral to our sense of self and other people’s sense of us – this is true of all of us, but for those of us who are born girls, who are fat, who are queer, who are people of colour, whose bodies are not Norm, our bodies mediate and affect our experience of the world much more profoundly.
Many of these experiences are ones I can’t speak to – I am cis, white, thin – but still, growing up as a girl has meant that for fifteen years I have not known how to live in, or with, my body. It has meant that people see me as body first, girl second, person third. Bodies interrupt and disrupt our relationships, even now, as adults. I have spent years trying to overcome the battle-lines which were drawn before I knew we were at war.
I am interested in explorations of girlhood which foreground this violence, which acknowledge that girl is something we have to work to be, as well as being something we cannot – without great difficulty – escape. Female coming-of-age is often violent, is bloody – literally – and ruthless. It is a process of becoming which is usually marked by repeated and crushing failures: failure to be pretty, failure to be thin, failure to accommodate men, failure to reject men, failure to protect oneself, failure to give oneself up when required.
Melissa Febos’ Girlhood is one such exploration. A lyrical memoir, Girlhood blends memoir with reportage, cultural criticism, and scholarship to examine the narratives women tell – or are told – about ourselves. Specifically, Girlhood examines how femininity is lived in the body, how it is brutally enforced, how we find ourselves trapped within its constraints and what happens when we try to liberate ourselves from them. It explores a web of relationships: between language and the body, between human and animal, between us and ourselves. It is both an investigation into the cultural phenomenon of girlhood, and a personal narrative about losing, and finding, oneself.
Opening with a Judith Butler epigraph (“Destruction is thus always restoration…”, from Gender Trouble), Girlhood traces a narrative of destruction and restoration. The author’s note introduces its central concerns: bodies, beauty, violence, narrative, self-alienation and -recovery. The female coming-of-age narratives that interest me, that feel true to my experience of girlhood, are the ones that share these themes. As Febos writes, “During [girlhood], we learn to adopt a story about ourselves”: this is the core of girlhood’s violence, that we do not write our own stories – we adopt them, we accept the ones handed to us, or we do not accept and have them brutally forced onto us anyway. We do not get to be the authors of our own lives; the only authority we are permitted is confined to existing cultural scripts. Will we be a good girl, or a rebel, or a slut? Will we even be allowed to choose?
Classic stories of (white, middle-class) girlhood revolve around this desire for self-determination, for narrative control, and often this is expressed through violence – in The Virgin Suicides, the sisters’ violence is visited on themselves; in The Girls, on the cult’s famous victims. In real life, the need to control something in our lives is often turned inwards – generally speaking, boys and men are more likely to direct violence at others, while women and girls are more likely to self-harm, develop eating disorders, and attempt suicide.[1] These behaviours can be read as attempts to assert a kind of narrative control – “suicide is as much a statement of the desire to control life as it is to end it”[2]; “to take one’s life is to force others to read one’s death”[3] – but they are also attempts at control which are exercised literally on the body. Girls’ bodies are the sites of our oppression – they are what make us “girls” and not “children”, come puberty – and they are also the sites of the war we wage against ourselves.
Febos’ book traces the ways in which girlhood “can lead to the exile of many parts of the self”, and the question of how to assimilate these different self-stories into something coherent; how not to be separated from oneself, or, if separated, how to return to oneself. For Febos, reclaiming authority has come about through literally claiming authorship: “It is in part by writing this book that I have corrected the story of my own girlhood and found ways to recover myself.” The essays themselves take on different subjects, but each fundamentally revolves around the dual realms of the linguistic and the bodily.
The prologue to Girlhood takes a more lyrical, disjointed form than the seven essays: a numbered series of vignettes which calls to mind Nelson’s Bluets and Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. These circuitous fragments trace the arc of the book, Febos’ journey through self-alienation and back to herself, via her experiments in body modification (both purposeful and not). Presenting childhood, but especially girlhood, as a series of markings, Febos explores the role of the body in mediating our movement through the world: “You know the need to engrave things”, she says to her younger self, whose “body is a secret you keep.” Bodies are both slates to be marked and secrets to be kept, both public and private, both expressive and mute. When Febos’ father looks at her, “he sees only the message you carry” – her body is both more and less than itself, a message, a symbol; it is something for other people, something they will assign meaning to, something they will (mis)read.
In The Mirror Test, Febos traces the development of both the stories that we tell about ourselves, and the stories that are told about us. In Lacanian theory, “The self becomes unified and objectified simultaneously, and the uneasy grasping for a fixed subject begins. The baby cannot tell the difference between the mirror self and her actual self. It is thefirst story she tells herself about herself: that is me. It is the beginning of self-alienation.” The act of claiming a self is also an act of distancing – for something to be claimed, it must necessarily be separate.
“This fragmented self is reconciled by the creation of an anticipatory body [...] The creation of a story about the body—I will have boobs, I will have a bathing suit, I will unzip it all the way to here—to reconcile the distance between the image of the self and the experience of the self allows us to move through space, to have a conception of identity that feels solid, though it is not. It is the construction of a fiction that will eventually harden into something else.”
Febos evidences the necessity of this self-construction by exploring what happens when we do not define ourselves – the stories others tell about us to fill the gap: “What was a reputation but the story most often told about a person?” If we do not name ourselves, others will name us, and their names will stick – “The slut is what she will become if people call her one, if she does not manage her reputation. [...] Society creates you.” If we do not participate in this creation of self, we are denied any power; all we can do is try to put forward the narrative we want people to believe, a process which is in itself violent: as Febos tells it, the pursuit of authorial control, of control over one’s reputation, “often requires the annihilation of other stories.”
This performance of identity is fragile, reliant on the corroboration of witnesses whose power is greater than ours – at best, “[t]he self becomes a collaboration with other people.” At worst, despite our best efforts, we are condemned, powerless. Febos blends events from her own adolescence with those of women she spoke to in researching the book, and narratives from pop culture. One such narrative is Easy A: Olive, a virgin who stands accused of being a slut, “is not alone in the truth of herself” because “the viewer is always there to witness her” (there’s also something here about the “frame” of the webcam – that people within the story also eventually witness her being not-a-slut and she is redeemed). “Whereas we who were punished for the things we did or didn’t do, we were alone. There was no one to confirm the truth of us. There was not even a way to speak it.”
The inability to name oneself and one’s experiences works backwards, too – not only are we powerless to define ourselves, we are often denied the chance to have a witness to our pain. In Intrusions, Febos writes about being stalked: “There was no way then to name that violation, and no one to name it to.” Deprived of the ability to name ourselves and our experiences, we have no confirmation, no assurance that we are who we say we are or that what happened to us really happened. No wonder, then, that Febos often describes her younger self in the second or third person, enacting the self-alienation she describes by separating Febos the narrator – the author, the one in control – and Febos the girl, the victim.
In the course of the prologue, Febos is separated from her body and from herself (“the knots of skin between you, and you, and you”) before finally reconciling herself to herself through body modification: “You carve the things you want to remember into your shoulder, your hip, the crook of your arm [...] connecting the dots of your heavenly body.” Her body is marked, first by others, then herself, in a process of reclamation – if others insist on reading your body, they will read what you engrave on it. Just as the writing of Girlhood itself has allowed Febos to “[correct] the story of my own girlhood and [find] ways to recover myself”, body modification has brought about a similar kind of narrative authority, a way of inscribing her own “message” onto herself.
In Thesmophoria, Febos writes that, “I needed to retell our story,” meaning rewrite for herself the relationship between her and her mother; in Girlhood, she retells not only her life story but the story of her relationship with herself, with her body, with the outside world. It is, fundamentally, a sense-making project: in Les Calanques, the final essays, she writes that, “As a young woman I struck myself against everything—other bodies, cities, myself—but I could never make sense of the marks I made on them, or the marks they made on me.” In Girlhood, Febos learns to read the marks that she and the world have left on each other.
[1] LD Kenny, Daughters of Suburbia (Rutgers University Press, 2000), p.2-3
[2] Donna Gaines, Teenage Wasteland (University of Chicago Press, 1991), p.248
[3] Margaret Higgonet, “Speaking Silences: Women’s Suicide” in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Harvard University Press, 1986), p.68