ABSTRACT

I’m Not Just a Girl!* (Figure 7.1) is the work of one of my former sixth grade art students. When asked to create a work about a border significant to her own life, Brooke identified language as the border she wanted to explore in her work. Specifically, her work centered on the idea of how language labels and positions girls. She searched magazines, locating words that she felt defined “girls.” Through her work, she articulated a fairly complex idea about language. She was not simply saying, “These are names that hurt my feelings, these words never describe me”; rather, she was identifying how language orders her possibilities and demarcates invisible limits as normal and natural. Her work identified how discourses of girlhood constituted her own subjectivity and what it meant to be a “girl.”