For a long time, young people have enjoyed putting their own twist on their favourite stories and noting them down. Girls have a special relationship to this type of writing, called ‘transformative’ writing. In their educational and leisure time, girls have had ample opportunities to express their creative responses to texts.

Changes in technology have affected how girls transform texts. For centuries, paper and ink, or needle and sampler, were the only modes for girls to record their creativity. These material creations might be all that remain today, but they reflect conversations, play, reading and learning that girls experienced in real life.

Girls would not only reuse characters, themes, and plots from their own personal libraries, but they would also recycle popular forms. During the 19th century, creating scrapbooks and handmade (manuscript) magazines was very popular with girls. In the twentieth century, girls took part in the making of fanzines, a form which was used by many groups who had specialised interests.

Since the invention of the World Wide Web, girls have shared their transformative writing on personal blogs and fan fiction websites. Social media also encourages this practice in new, still unexplored ways. Although the technologies and tools available to girls changes across time and space, as does the appeal or aversion to the label ‘girl’, the desire to transform texts remains consistent.

We see this type of transformation of texts happens around the world, as well as throughout different time periods. It takes place amongst friends, within families, in digital global collectives, and in girls’ alone time. This exhibition takes us from the 1600s to the year 2025, and from Chicago to Iran. We hope you enjoy it!

Dr Lois Burke
R
esident Scholar
Girl Museum

As early as the 1600s, girls were inspired by the books they read to write their own versions. In manuscript and print, they ‘continued’ the stories that they had enjoyed or retold them from the perspectives of different characters.

Girls were often associated with the genre of romance in early modern Britain. While many commentators in the period warned about the dangers of romance reading, girls themselves demonstrated the benefits of imitating and adapting their reading of this genre.  Two examples of girl authors in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England exemplify how the reading of romance might be an opportunity for creativity.

Anna Weamys’s A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1651) is a ‘young’ (5v) author’s response to Sidney’s famous prose romance.  Described as ‘pretty stories’ and ‘smooth strains of early poesy’ (5v), Weamys’s fiction is seen by her contemporaries as the work of her aged and gendered state as a girl.

Weamys demonstrates an awareness of gendered expectations through her writing but nonetheless inserts herself into literary traditions through her extensive adaptation of Sidney’s text and positions her writing within a community of young women by appealing to ‘two unparalleled sisters’ (3r), Lady Anne and Grace Pierrepont, to support the publication of her work.

In 1704, the teenage Lady Mary Pierrepont, better known by her later married name Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, also draws on her romance reading to write her own epistolary fiction, Indamora to Lindamira.  Pierrepont’s text, she tells her readers, is a direct response to the popular published romance The Adventures of Lindamira (1702).

Pierrepont claims:

I have read somewhere a book thus intitled
The Adventures of Lindamira a Lady of Quality
Written by her own hand to a Friend  in the country
In one of Lindamira’s Letters She Desires her freind Indamora to requite her with the Hystory of her Life – I have writt it on my own Invention. (xiv)

This representation of her work as both a response to her reading and an act of ‘invention’ reveals a long history of girls and young women participating in cultures of textual imitation and transformation.  Pierrepont’s fiction reimagines the story from the perspective of a character, Indamora, who does not have a voice in the original story, creating a new narrative that plays with the conventions of romance to comment on girlhood experience in a manuscript that was likely shared with a group of readers that included Pierrepont’s sister and friends.

By taking the romances they read as prompts for their own textual production, these early modern girls write what might be seen as early examples of fan fiction: drawing on their reading to invent new stories within communities of young women inclined to participate in the period’s cultures of reading and writing.

Edel Lamb
Queen’s University Belfast

References

Pierrepont, Mary. Indamora to Lindamira. Ed. Isobel Grundy. Alberta: Juvenilia Press, 1994.
Weamys, Anna. A Continuation of Sir Philip Sydney’s Arcadia. London, 1651.

Title page of Anna Weamys, A Continuation of Sir Philip Sydney’s Arcadia (1651). Weamys, Anna. A Continuation of Sir Philip Sydney’s Arcadia (London, 1651), title page. Call No. 166-792q. STC. R208978. Digital Image: 54154. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Mary Pierrepont’s Manuscript, c. 1704/1705, Harrowby MS 250. Private collection. ‘Harrowby MS 250, fol. 5, included by kind permission of the 8th Earl of Harrowby, Sandon Hall’.

Engraving of Lady Mary Pierrepont. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Stipple engraving by Caroline Watson, 1803. Wellcome Images, Library reference: ICV No 4281, Photo number: V0004079.

Have you ever created your own magazine? Victorian girls in Britain would adapt the magazine form in their own homemade versions, play at being famous writers, and transform the literature that they read.

Like scrapbooking, creating magazines at home was a popular hobby towards the end of the 19th century. In these homemade magazines, known as manuscript (handwritten) magazines, writers aimed to recreate aspects of the printed periodicals that they were reading in real life. Therefore, many manuscript magazines include a decorative front cover and a masthead (the title of the publication), and often the contributions were presented in columns. Typical contributions to manuscript magazines included articles, serialised stories and poetry, but correspondence pages, jokes, riddles, and illustrations could often be found too. Some poems were titled ‘Apologies to Coleridge’ or ‘Apologies to Tennyson’, showing the humble approach that manuscript magazine writers expressed towards famous writers.

Girls were particularly interested in creating manuscript magazines. Groups of girls like those who wrote the Barnacle (1859–1871) took their task very seriously. They saw writing for this manuscript magazine as an opportunity to improve their style and train to be professional writers. The editor of the Barnacle was the author and magazine editor Charlotte Yonge, who was highly respected by her apprentice girl writers. The late Victorian period saw new jobs for women as writers and journalists, and some of the Barnacle’s girl writers did indeed go on to become published authors.

Famously, Charlotte and Branwell Brontë created their own manuscript magazines in the 1820s. The Brontë children’s projects inspired other girls to write manuscript magazines later in the century. Martha G. A. Summers, a fourteen-year-old farmer’s daughter from Dorset, England, wrote in her introduction to her manuscript magazine the Family Magazine (1866),

‘It gives me great pleasure to introduce this periodical to my friends; many of whom, and I trust, will support me in the undertaking. I have now in my remembrance others who were successful in the enterprise; amongst them was Charlotte Brontë.’

The name of Martha’s enterprise, the Family Magazine, speaks to the importance of family members in the creation of manuscript magazines. Girls took on literary roles even in manuscript magazines which involved the whole family. In these photographs of the Punch Bowl (1902–1906), which was created by the brothers and sisters of the Orr family from Glasgow, Scotland, we see that their young sister Marion postured herself as a famous author being interviewed at home.

In manuscript magazines we can see how girls expressed their desires, their talents and sense of humour through writing. For these reasons, we can see them as an important forerunner for girls’ textual cultures that would emerge in the twentieth century.

Dr. Lois Burke
Tilburg University

The Punch Bowl front cover, vol. XII, November 1905. All images reproduced with kind permission of Graeme Orr.

‘Illustrated Interview with Miss Orr’, Punch Bowl, vol. XII, November 1905.

Illustrated Interview with Miss Orr’, Punch Bowl, vol. XII, November 1905.

An adaptive culture flourished in Chicago settlement houses, where working class girls improvised their own theatricals.

Every week during the 1910s, a small army of girls descended on the clubrooms of Northwestern University Settlement with one purpose in mind: bringing stories to life. The eighty-seven “actresses, fairy lovers, and story tellers” who comprised the “Once Upon a Time” and “Make Believe” clubs were working-class daughters of immigrants, residing in Chicago’s most overcrowded and impoverished neighborhood (Vittum). Most of the girls shouldered a large share of domestic responsibility in their households and were expected to leave school at the age of fourteen to secure paid labor. Despite their limited access to formal education, club members demonstrated impressive skill in using group improvisation to adapt text into original plays.

Detailing the creative process for local families, volunteer club leader Catherine Lagerquist identified the girls’ “instincts to imitate and dramatize” as a valuable community resource. Immersive “make believe” helped “shy” girls to “gain self-confidence and a greater power of expression,” she explained, while collaborative devising promoted an ethos of “team play.” In Lagerquist’s view, literary adaptation prepared girls to imagine a more active role for themselves in society and politics and provided them with the expressive confidence they would need to contribute their voices and ideas to social reform initiatives (Lagerquist).

In turn-of-the-century Chicago—a city characterized by rapid industrialization, widespread poverty, and mass migration—settlement houses offered unique venues for working-class girls to pursue education in the arts and humanities, and to contribute to Progressive Era political movements. Inspired by London’s Toynbee Hall, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr established Hull-House, Chicago’s first settlement house, in 1889, and the movement quickly spread throughout the city’s industrial neighborhoods. Settlement club leaders brought in participatory literary activities—such as reading aloud, discussing and dramatizing texts, and editing club newspapers—to help girls build rhetorical and collaborative skills.

Some immigrant participants gravitated towards the adaptation of canonical Anglo-American literature, eager to claim belonging in their adopted homeland. Others took inspiration from urban mass culture, improvising their own “theatricals” based on popular plays, songs, and dime novels. Whether writing themselves into mainstream literary culture or activating their favorite characters and narratives from mass media, working-class girls demonstrated enormous capacity for autonomous creative production.

Over time, club leaders and members transformed their collaborative play and performance methods into a political philosophy, innovating a literary model for democratic governance and community organizing. Training a critical eye on an existing text or local condition, participants layered individual ideas until they collectively agreed on improvements that would better serve their neighborhoods. As they matured into young workingwomen, club members channeled the imaginative and expressive power they had acquired through textual play into movements for women’s suffrage and labor justice. Having spent their girlhoods boldly reimagining source texts and bringing fantasy worlds into reality, a life beyond subordination seemed within grasp.

Fiona Maxwell
University of Chicago

References

Harriet Vittum, Head Resident Report to Settlement Council, 17 March 1916, pp. 1-2, Northwestern University Settlement Association General Administrative Records, Box 4, Folder 5, Northwestern University Archives.

Catherine C. Lagerquist, “‘Make Believe’ and ‘Once Upon a Time,’” The Neighbor (April-May 1916): 12.

Group of girls at the Chicago Commons summer camp, who became known for improvising "amateur theatricals" based on popular media. "A Rare Tale on 'Point Story,'" The Commons 6, no. 65 (December 1901): 14.

Girls and their families gathered behind the tenement houses of Chicago's Sixteenth Ward, ca. 1900. Box 2, Folder 4, Northwestern University Settlement Association Photographs, Northwestern University Archives.

A play rehearsal at Hull-House led by neighborhood girl Nicolette Malone, ca. 1930s. Folder 350, Hull-House Photograph Collection, University of Illinois Chicago Special Collections and University Archives.

Have you ever wanted to document your favourite experience at the theatre? Girls in early twentieth century New York would write about their favourite performers and performances.

Attending the theater was a popular pastime for girls and young women in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. In fact, by 1910 theater audiences in New York City were mostly made up of girls and women. During this period, many theatergoing girls kept scrapbooks to chronicle the variety of stage performances they attended.

Scrapbooking was a popular way for girls to preserve the memory of what they attended and celebrate their theatergoing experiences, keeping memories alive. Through scrapbooking, girls actively participated in the popular culture of their time.

Many people—adults and children alike—used scrapbooks to organize a variety of print material, such as clippings from magazines and newspapers, into a useful format for future reference. Girls’ theater scrapbooks allowed them to compile clippings from newspapers and magazines along with ticket stubs and theater programs to document and remember the performances they attended.

Some girls also wrote notes in their scrapbooks about when, where, and with whom they attended plays and concerts. Sometimes they also noted their opinions about performances or included favorite quotations from plays they had seen. Girls’ theater scrapbooks show a fascination with the performers on stage and the stories presented that resembles today’s fandoms surrounding television and movies.

At age 13, Alma Mae Clarke Fontaine (1909-1999) began her first scrapbook to document her fascination with a production of Hamlet starring actor John Barrymore, which she saw twice in both February and December 1923. For months, she saved clippings about the play and its leading man, sustaining her excitement.

She included images she cut out of magazines and newspapers depicting scenes from Hamlet and other plays, as well as images of Barrymore and other stars in and out of character. She also pasted into her scrapbook newspaper reviews and programs from other Shakespeare productions and articles celebrating the popularity of Shakespeare’s plays.

On some pages, Alma included handwritten comments and notes, including favorite quotations from the plays. Eventually, her obsession with Hamlet was joined by an obsession with famed prima ballerina, Anna Pavlova, about whom Alma focused much of her second scrapbook volume.

Scrapbooks like Alma’s reveal a widespread habit of collecting and arranging print material that celebrates performances and favorite performers. These scrapbooks provide a glimpse into the textual lives of girls at the beginning of the twentieth century in America.

Sarah Glosson
College of William & Mary

On this page of Alma Fontaine’s scrapbook, she pasted her ticket stub from a matinee performance of Barrymore’s Hamlet she attended in December 1923, along with an image depicting Barrymore out of costume and surrounded by luggage. Notice that Alma carefully clipped around the edges of this image so that Barrymore pops off the page. At the top of the page a newspaper advertisement for the run of Hamlet she attended anchors and gives context to the other two items on the page. Alma Fontaine Papers, 1923-1926, Special Collections Research Center, Swem Library, College of William & Mary.

This page of Alma’s scrapbook is dominated by an image from Women’s Home Companion (March 4, 1923) of John Barrymore as Hamlet pasted across the centerfold. Alma accompanied this image with a handwritten quotation from Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” speech. Alma Fontaine Papers, 1923-1926, Special Collections Research Center, Swem Library, College of William & Mary.

As Alma’s obsession turned to ballerina Anna Pavlova, she pasted more than a dozen pictures of Pavlova depicted in a variety of costumes and poses. Above this image of the dancer in a performance of “Snowflakes,” she writes, “Some more of Pavlowa (sic) but not yet sufficient.” Alma Fontaine Papers, 1923-1926, Special Collections Research Center, Swem Library, College of William & Mary.

Is fan fiction written only by girls? Who else is now and has historically been active in the participatory communities producing transformative works?

That fan fiction is written by girls and women for other girls and women is often taken for granted; fan fiction communities are considered “sites [where] women and girls can feel that they are participating in traditional female writing and reading” (De Kosnik 135). However, recent studies, particularly studies relating to fandoms like Sherlock and Harry Potter have destabilized the idea that fan fiction communities are made up exclusively of female-identifying individuals and have more deeply considered the gender fluidity of authors alongside the gender fluidity that often appears in fan fiction.

Moreover, careful examination of what De Kosnik calls “traditional female reading and writing” communities, whether fictional or real, demonstrate that while most participants are girls and young women, some are not. What is more, many of the girls who participate in such communities have troubled relationships with their prescribed gender.

The gendering of transformative reading and writing practices from the nineteenth century to today, a time period which Catherine Driscoll associates with the development of the modern concept of girlhood, can therefore be troubled. The association of writing with girls can be questioned, and the tensions that arise when juvenility, womanhood, and transformative reading and writing practices are considered concomitant allow us to theorize what I term the girlness of such practices—not just for women but also for the queer/trans folx and boys/men deemed both immature and effeminate for their participation in transformative practices.

Taking up girlness (as opposed to girliness) is a resistive, queer, and feminine act that is not dependent on gender identity so much as on gendered orientations, affects, and practices. Girlness is a specific type of youthful and queer femininity not foregrounded by biological sex or age. Girlness can therefore be seen as a category akin to childness (Beauvais, Introduction, “Is There a Text”; Hollindale). It encompasses femininity, juvenility, and queerness.

More, girlness does not preclude adulthood, for like childness, it depends not on a person’s age so much as their affects and orientations (Beauvais, Introduction, “Is There a Text”; Hollindale). Like childness, girlness is a “property” both of the assumed readers and authors of transformative works and of the texts they produce and read (Hollindale 47; Beauvais, Introduction 3). This property is not necessarily biologically essentialist; rather, it is fluid and socially constructed. As such, it is “contextual, situated and dynamic,” “a constantly negotiated, ever-shifting property” (Beauvais, Introduction 3). It can play a part in identity, if identity is envisioned as “a ‘production’, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (Hall 222).

Finally, girlness is not to be confused with girliness, for while girly individuals can and do take part in fan fiction communities, transformative reading and writing practices are also often associated with tomboyishness, androgyny, and the queer.

Jennifer Duggan
University of South-Eastern Norway

References

De Kosnik, Abigail. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. The MIT Press, 2016.

Driscoll, Catherine. Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory, Columbia UP, 2002.

Beauvais, Clémentine. Introduction. Any Signs of Childness?, special issue of Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 50, 2019, pp. 60–75.

Beauvais, Clémentine. “Is There a Text in This Child? Childness and the Child-Authored Text.” Any Signs of Childness?, special issue of Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 50, 2019, pp. 60–75.

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference, edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Duke University Press, 2021, pp. 222–37.

Hollindale, Peter. Signs of Childness in Children’s Books. Thimble Press, 1997.

“Amy and Laurie” from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, 1869. Reproduced with kind permission from 990027351570203941, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

AI-generated image of the kids cowriting fan fiction (generated with DALL-E).

AI-generated image of the four Brontë siblings making magazines at their kitchen table (generated with DALL-E).

The fandoms of Twilight show that girls today can both revel in and poke fun at this cultural phenomenon.

The Twilight Saga, a young adult novel and film series created by Stephanie Meyer and released between 2005 and 2012, was a cultural phenomenon that captured a teenage girl audience. The fantasy romance story follows 17-year-old Bella Swan’s coming of age in a small, rainy town, where she falls in love with a teenage vampire, Edward Cullen.

With this popularity came significant criticism. Critics argued Twilight perpetuated outdated ideas about gender and romance or that Bella was a poor role model. Others said it lacked quality compared to classic vampire tales. Girl fans of the series were stereotyped as having bad taste, being too passionate, and blindly following trends. These stereotypes aren’t new; girl readers of gothic romance stories have faced similar criticism as early as the eighteenth century. Twilight became a famous cultural reference when discussing girls as readers.

Yet, almost two decades later, the Twilight fanbase is still active, and contemporary Internet culture has offered unique ways for new and old fans to engage with the series. Many now embrace Twilight as both nostalgic and flawed – a source of comfort and fun.

Twilight fans all of ages gather on message boards and social media platforms like Facebook, Tumblr, and TikTok to discuss the series. They also share stories or photos from their Twilight re-reading sessions, movie marathons, trivia nights, or themed parties. They bond by sharing inside jokes or “memes” about the series. These jokes might laugh at the melodrama or vampire lore, but unlike the dismissive critiques of the 2000s, they rely on shared love and knowledge of the series.

Fans also discuss how their awareness of the “fangirl” stereotype has shaped their tastes or interests. They discuss how cultural ideas about girlhood have affected them, and enjoy texts like Twilight despite judgment.

Another way girls creatively read Twilight is through the online “aesthetic” of #twilightcore. This refers to fan-made content like collages, mood boards, playlists, and artwork that try to evoke Twilight’s unique atmosphere, or its “aesthetic”. #twilightcore content is shared on visual-oriented social media sites including Tumblr, Pinterest, TikTok, and YouTube, organised using tags. These creative works focus on Bella’s feelings and experiences, her favourite clothes, books, and music, and dark, mysterious visuals. The romantic, gothic imagery of Twilight has inspired a new generation of girls to explore the kind of bookish, curious, dreamy girls they want to be.

This example shows how girl readers and viewers are creative, self-reflective, and analytical, even when society thinks their interests are frivolous or even harmful. With humour, sincerity, and artistry, both new and old Twilight fans reclaim the series as a shared reference point for connection and self-expression.

Just as Bella Swan wished to remain a teenage vampire forever, online Twilight fan communities see “girlhood” as a creative, playful space we can access regardless of age.

Ellen McGeoch
University of Sydney

The bestselling Twilight Saga book series by Stephanie Meyer was published between 2008-2012, and inspired a series of film adaptations.

Fans post online about watching the Twilight films or re-reading the book series for fun, comfort, and nostalgia.

An example of a #twilightcore collage inspired by Bella Swan's clothing, favourite books, and the mood of the Twilight films.

Iranian fan fiction inspired by Anne of Green Gables shows how fandoms travel across nations and generations.

Whether in the form of social media posts or fan fiction, the fan work created in L.M. Montgomery and Jean Webster’s Iranian fandoms transforms the story worlds originally created by the two authors in various ways. In Iran, there is significant overlap between L.M. Montgomery and Jean Webster fan communities, with many blogs and Instagram accounts devoted to both Anne Shirley from Montgomery’s Anne books and Judy Abbott from Webster’s Daddy Long Legs (1912). The reason for this is potentially the similar aesthetics between the Japanese company Nippon Animation’s Anne of Green Gables and My Daddy Long Legs, both of which remain the most popular adaptations of Montgomery’s and Webster’s novels in Iran.

The nostalgic appeal of Nippon Animation’s adaptations of the works of the two authors provides a common ground to cultivate girl friendships through creating and engaging with fan-made digital gifts such as social media posts dedicated to Anne and Judy, providing a sense of personal and communal female identity in contemporary Iran.

Similarly, examining fanfiction pieces such as Sorayya Jolghani’s 2008 novel To My Wife Judy and Khanum Mah’s online novel Anne Shirley in Iran (2023) provides new insights into individual fan practices and potentially expands the approaches to studying transnational fan communities. By engaging with the original texts in this way, these two pieces of fanfiction both honor and transform the original narratives, allowing for a more diverse exploration of the characters’ journeys.

However, like any other fandom, L.M. Montgomery and Jean Webster’s Iranian fan communities are not immune from creating a certain level of hierarchy that normalizes the experiences of the girls who have access to social media platforms and who consider Anne and Judy as important parts of their personal history.

With that said, the minimal emphasis on familiarity with the original novels in social posts, combined with the tradition of fan-made gift exchanges, creates an overall positive environment in Montgomery and Webster’s Iranian fandoms. This enables Iranian girls from different generations to connect over their mutual adoration for Anne and Judy, establishing a welcoming space for, as Anne would put it, a community of “kindred spirits.”

Maryam Khorasami
University of Florida

Sorayya Jolghani’s novel To My Wife Judy, published by Peydayesh, 2008.

Anne of Green Gables’ Persian edition, translated by Sara Ghadyani, Ghadyani Publications, 2007.

Digital media platforms have fundamentally transformed how people engage with books. Among girls and young women, this transformation is seen most prominently on BookTok where they discuss and recommend books, participate in fandoms, and above all, build community.

BookTok display at Waterstones bookstore; Glasgow, December 2024.

Marta Courtenay’s TikTok video posted on 9 October 2022.

Nowhere are girls’ and young women’s contemporary textual cultures currently more visible than on BookTok. BookTok is a portmanteau of ‘books’ and ‘TikTok’ and emerged as a hashtag on the hyperpopular social media platform TikTok when users began posting book recommendations. Over the course of the first COVID-19 lockdown, BookTok quickly developed into a vibrant subcommunity of readers and bibliophiles. From sequels and screen adaptations to sold out backlists, BookTok has since had a discernible impact on book sales, reading habits, and reading culture at large.

The second life of Adam Silvera’s Young Adult novel They Both Die At The End (2017) offers an early example of BookTok’s crucial role in shaping book sales. Several years after it was first published, Silvera’s novel reemerged as a fan favourite owing entirely to a viral trend on BookTok. This trend was about pure emotion: readers – primarily young adult girls – filmed themselves reading the sad novel.

Unlike conventional book reviews that focus on plot and formal literary elements, these readers foregrounded how they feel about the book. Most of these videos end with the readers crying to the sad ending of the book; a fitting trend within the BookTok community built around authenticity, relatability, and emotions.

Be it beloved bookfluencers with hundreds of thousands of followers or more small-scale creators making bookish content on niche genres, at the core of BookTok lies the creative and emotional labour of a primarily female (presenting) community.

BookTok can therefore be seen as an extension of the long history of girls’ and young women’s transformative textual practices. As seen in this exhibition, girls have always been keen readers who have appropriated texts in their own unique ways. TikTok’s powerful algorithm and wide range of features expand their creative repertoire, allowing them to engage with texts in an ever-evolving manner.

Marta Courtenay’s (@martacourtenay) compilation of books that feel like the stems of Taylor Swift’s Cardigan (2020) is a wonderful, well-crafted example. Through skillful choice of makeup (that shade of lipstick!) and hair (those bangs!), we see Marta bearing a striking resemblance to Swift herself. TikTok’s seamless integration of sound allows her to incorporate the stems of Cardigan and she hums along in the video while revealing novels that had the same emotional impact on her as the song.

As a self-branded ‘bookish swiftie,’ Marta’s transformative textual practices extend not only to the novels in her compilation but also to Swift’s song, bringing together bookish and pop culture fandoms. The combination of (inter)textual, visual, acoustic, cosmetic, and fannish elements therefore creates a richly layered expression of her experience with the texts.

Sonali Kulkarni
Tilburg University

Credits

We would like to thank Lois Burke, Girl Museum Resident Scholar, and all the authors for contributing to this unique exhibition. Lois, Jennifer Duggan and Edel Lamb, edited the upcoming book, Girls’ and Young Women’s Textual Cultures Across History: Imitation, Adaptation, Transformation, which includes essays by all these authors. We are celebrating the girls who have transformed texts over the centuries, as well as these scholars’ book, examining their work.

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