Portrait of the Monster as a Young Girl – An Interactive Dialogue

Abstract

The teenage girl constructs her identity amidst a chorus of conflicting voices. She both replicates and resists the patterns of good girl/bad girl as displayed by earlier generations, trying to figure out who she is and how she might live in her body, in the world.

Evil women – bad girls – defy the binary definitions of good and bad, both in body and spirit. They are the bad feminist, they are the Sea Witch, they are the art monster. But when we claim the monster as our role model, we commit her (and ourselves) to the constraints of the patriarchy – replicating a predetermined way of being a girl. There must be a way to define ourselves beyond these constraints. How does one become the monster?

Teen identity is constructed via research, rehearsal and performance: the trying on of multiple possible selves. One person's performed identity becomes the benchmark that others measure themselves against.

Like Courtney Love, who said she didn't want to be with the band, she wanted to be in the band, we all want to belong. We all want to stand out. How sharply we carve the edges of ourselves to fit.

This interactive ‘Fakebook dialogue’ allows Bec and Simmone to draw a line through theory and personal experience, bringing the voices of academia to life, and imagining them in conversation with ourselves and the women whom we have resisted, used as role models or temporarily dreamed ourselves into being. Our piece is set in the nexus of the body and the self. We incorporate autotopography and self-representation as shaped by shared cultural objects to interrogate existing modes of replication and resistance and try to imagine the monstrous shape of our true identity.

Citation

Howell, S. and Kavanagh, B. (2022), "Portrait of the Monster as a Young Girl – An Interactive Dialogue", Rumson, L. and Bentham, A. (Ed.) Divergent Women (Emerald Interdisciplinary Connexions), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 9-21. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80117-678-120221002