Welcome to Girl Museum’s interview series, Why We Need Girls’ Studies, for 2024. We have many exciting interviews this year with important scholars in the field to get insights about what we are all doing in this space to further our understanding of girlhood and girls’ experiences.
This month’s interview is with Lashon Daley, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature and director of the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at San Diego State University. Her book project, Black Girl Lit: The Coming of (R)age Performances in Contemporary U.S. Black Girlhood Narratives, 1989-2019, charts how children’s literature, film, television, and social media has helped shape our cultural understanding of what it means to be young, Black, and female in the U.S.
Why do you consider it important to study girlhood?
To study girlhood is to study culture. Girlhood is a lens through which our humanity can be examined. While girlhood is both a political category and a social identity, it can also be a helpful tool to discover the evolution of language, art, literature, music, etc. I must admit that my scholarship reframes girlhood as an object that can be dissected and studied. I, in no way, think this about girls themselves. For me “girlhood” is a noun—a person, place, and thing. Not “or” thing. Maybe a better way of explaining myself is to think of girlhood as a Lego set. You can construct a person or a helicopter or a castle all by putting different pieces together. Each piece can then be broken down again and turned into something new. This is why I believe studying girlhood is so important (and fascinating), it has all these moving parts. And every time something new is built, something else has been dismantled. I often think to myself, “If you want to know the future of a culture, study girlhood.”
Girlhood studies is a relatively new field, yet is rapidly changing. What are the biggest opportunities for those interested in studying girlhood?
I would swap out “yet” for “and,” and “changing” for “expanding.”
“Girlhood studies is a relatively new field, and is rapidly expanding.”
I am so grateful to be a part of a field where I am actively building the foundational scholarship. In 2021, I released my first article titled “Coming of (R)age: A New Genre for Contemporary Narratives about Black Girlhood,” where I was able to develop new research on Black girlhood as a result of the field expanding and becoming more interdisciplinary. The biggest opportunity right now is having your research help to move the field forward.
What is the biggest challenge facing girlhood studies? Do you have ideas on how we can address it?
There is so much good research that we can do, but there just isn’t enough of us to do it. There are cultures and identities that are being left out of the research because there are not enough scholars to cover these other important areas. However, I believe that as the field expands and as the next generation of researchers are inducted into the field, research scarcity will no longer be a challenge.
Finally, please feel free to plug any current projects or publications that you want to highlight.
I am working on three articles and my monograph simultaneously! The first article is about how to expand Black girlhood studies as a subfield. The second article is looking at the new generation of Black girl activists in middle-grade and young adult novels. And the third article is looking at Black/Korean identities in children’s literature. And my monograph explores the “objectification” of Black girlhood. I am happy to share more as each piece moves through the publication process. I can be reached here if anyone is interested in learning more about my work.