ABSTRACT
This chapter materializes around encounters with girlhood through Polaroid images taken of me in my bedroom when I was ten years old. As a developmental life stage, girlhood is always configured as “the past.” Caught in a trap of linear temporality, we must successfully move on from one stage to achieve the next. But chronological thinking leads to a separation between past and present that diminishes the potential of girlhood as an affective force in the now. Rather than a developmental period meant to be left behind, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s theorizing of affect and becoming and Bergson’s concept of duration, I explore temporality as dynamic and non-directional. Through this immanent lens, girlhood is not construed as a “who” or “what” or “when,” but as a transforming and transformative force that enables it to endure not just as memory but as embodied affect that reverberates through a co-constituting past-present. Polaroid possibilities thus attune me to the question “How might we feel the affective force of ongoing girlhood through material and temporal relations, and what might this immanent approach have to offer Girlhood Studies?”
