A Cultural History of the Schoolgirl: From St Trinian's to Malory Towers

CLASS DESCRIPTION

The schoolgirl and her distinctive aesthetic of uniforms, hockey sticks and awkward puberty is a well-established archetype in the twenty-first century, but in the nineteenth century such a character was almost entirely unknown, girls’ education still a controversial and precariously progressive idea. As the number of girls engaged in compulsory education grew, their experiences were reflected in popular media with magazines such as The Schoolgirls’ Weekly and the novels of authors such as Elinor Brent-Dyer, initially for girls themselves, but increasingly for other audiences.

Beginning with the jolly schoolgirl scrapes of girls’ school stories in the late Victorian period, this lecture chronologically follows the development of the schoolgirl trope, particularly attentive to those moments of fetishisation and sexualisation that objectify the schoolgirl. Working through a variety of imagery from schoolgirl parodies like Daisy Pulls It Off (1983) and Ronald Searle’s St Trinians’s School comics (1946-52); the Joshikousei schoolgirls of Japanese popular culture; and the popularity of scandalous school uniforms as in Britney Spears infamous 1999 music video and the popularity of television series like Gossip Girl (2007).

Examining these cultural touchstones, this lecture encourages students to pay particular attention to the schoolgirl’s origins as a troublesome and radical femininity, a new category of being that broaches girlhood and womanhood, prolonging the time in which a girl can enjoy childhood and postpone marital/maternal duties. It examines the class and racial connotations of girls in uniform, the positionality of girls in the classroom and how these off-balance negotiations of discipline and power burst through in media representations of schoolgirlhood.

By focusing on girls specifically, this lecture encourages students to consider how feminism interacts with questions of race and age, how girls are often omitted from feminist analysis as insufficiently enlightened or as subjects of patriarchy in ways that risk denying agency. As such, the theoretical lens proposes a broadening of feminism in a way that encompasses girlhoods more readily, particularly when looking at girls' media, so often disparaged as ‘silly’. This lecture also touches on so many of our lived experiences - undoubtedly many students will have worn school uniform and been the schoolgirl, been prefects and head girls, and have first-hand experience of how they were perceived as schoolgirls. Incorporating the multiplicity of real schoolgirl experiences into our understanding of its cultural representation facilitates an analysis which emphasises the troublesome positionality of the schoolgirl and her short yet complicated cultural history.

ABOUT OUR LECTURER

Atlanta Tsiaoukkas is a PhD student at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge researching the development of the schoolgirl in early girls’ school fiction. Her research interests include historical and contemporary girls’ fiction, particularly queer narratives and representations of sports participation. She has also written extensively about pop culture for journals including Autostraddle and Polyester.

INSTAGRAM: @aatlanta_aa
SUBSTACK: https://girlishh.substack.com/

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