ABSTRACT
The chapter uses intersectional feminist analysis to interpret digital films created by adolescent girls in a Lexington County, South Carolina, juvenile arbitration program for first-time offenders. To create the films, girls engaged in discussing and mapping critical issues, traumatic events, and obstacles in their everyday lives including body image, partner violence, peer pressure, family conflict, drug addiction, and mental health. The intersectional interpretations flesh out how gender, race, class, and dis/ability as well as scarred relationships with partners, peers, and family members, impact girls’ lived bodies and artwork. They also complicate the traditional feminist notion of body image which extends beyond idealized female representations in popular media, celebrities, fashion, and other media-related influences which are typical for more privileged, White middle-and upper-middle-class adolescents. Girls’ deeply felt traumas-enacted via the multiple entanglements of social and cultural representations and relationships-generate a conflicting entity of the physical and psychological body which bears painful scars and memories and which requires a courageous act of self-love to be reclaimed and pieced back together.
