Invisible girl : “Ceci n’est pas une fille”

Author(s): Frånberg, Gun-Marie, Camilla Hällgren and Elza Dunkels (eds.)

Presentation from publisher

The Invisible Girl is an international, Swedish-based and multi-disciplinary research project about gender, youth culture power and learning. Together with 40 researchers and artists from 15 countries we aim to offer a critical perspective to studies of girls and girlhood and extend common views of the contemporary girl and her situation. The main outcome will be a freely available, online publication where recent research will be presented as chapters but also as artworks such as; poems, video, cartoons, digital imaging, photos and installations.

Being inspired by Ralph Ellison’s novel from 1952, The Invisible Man, we suspect that there is an invisible girl who, like Ellison’s black American, is invisible because of stereotyping and discriminating social structures. Another inspiration is the philosophy behind Magritte’s (1929) painting “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” [This is not a pipe], often interpreted as pointing out that the painting is not a pipe but an image of a pipe. The same metaphor illuminates the philosophical essence of The Invisible Girl. In similar manner we ask whether contemporary images of and research about girls reflect the girls’ own views of their reality or whether they should rather be interpreted as images of it. What does it mean to become a girl in contemporary societies? How can we describe and analyze the contemporary girl? Can we make the invisible girl visible in ways alternative to those of media? How can she be a girl in her own right?

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