ABSTRACT

This paper is framed by the notion that specific understandings of space and place are used in popular film to construct, maintain and challenge concepts of girlhood. It aims to show that rural spaces and places, as discursive, semiotic and affective formations, demarcate ‘rural’ girl subjects. Shaping gendered experiences, identities and power relations, ‘rurality’ is a key context where gendered and age-based learning occurs. In the examples selected here around four Australian films about girls growing up in rural locales, I think about how popular film might work to educate spectators about contemporary girls as asserting a sense of girlpower and as being ‘troubled’ and ‘troubling’ subjects. Furthermore, I consider how representations of the rural might be mobilised to incite audiences to make meaning around girlhoods, reaffirming or subverting what might be possible in rural contexts.