Girls Just Wanna Have Fun: Literacy, Consumerism, and Paradoxes of Position on gURL.com

Barbara Duncan
Kevin Leander

Preteens, Teens, and Online Spaces

According to the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development (1989), the preteen years are particularly important to address because they are often affected by shifting and inconsistent expectations, personal contradictions, and an increased sense of isolation:

In these changed times, when young people face unprecedented choices and pressures, all too often the guidance they needed as children and need no less as adolescents is withdrawn. Freed from the dependency of childhood, but not yet able to find their own path to adulthood, many young people feel a desperate sense of isolation. Surrounded only by their equally confused peers, too many make poor decisions with harmful or lethal consequences. (p. 8)

Moreover, because young girls tend to mature before their male peers, they can experience additional stress combined with an already mounting sense of self-doubt and ambivalence. In an influential document titled How Schools Shortchange Girls, the American Association of University Women (1992) claims that

For girls who are early maturers, puberty can be a particularly trying time. They tend to be heavier than their classmates in a culture that values slimness, and their social and emotional development may not match their physically mature appearance. Early-maturing girls exhibit more eating problems than average or late maturers and are at greater risk for depression. (p. 11)

On the one hand, research claims such as these may help perpetuate a culture of patriarchy by adding to alarmist rhetoric about girls. On the other hand, we might take the implications of such study as serious background for ongoing work on girls' identity development. We know that girls (and boys) are subject to rapid physiological changes during puberty, and that these changes are experienced unevenly, and interpreted differently, across individuals and groups. It also seems likely that girls are more easily targeted for advertising campaigns that sell identity-shaping products (fashion, music, and makeup) -- developing brand loyalty at a very early age -- because a desire for these products is created through image, something that girls understand as an important aspect of self.

In this article we address the topic of hidden literacies as they are expressed through the ideological baggage of a relatively new medium, an online space designed especially for young women. While diverse nonacademic literacies have been studied in a range of settings (e.g., Alvermann, Hinchman, Moore, Phelps, & Waff, 1998), the study of nonacademic literacies practiced by adolescents online is only just beginning. The likely reasons for this current lack in the professional literature are numerous, including the general privileging of school spaces within educational research and the rapid emergence of such new online spaces. Additionally, online literacy practices present numerous research difficulties, for which we need new methodologies (e.g., how do we trace practice across embodied and virtual spaces?) Here, we follow Alvermann (1998) in using the binary of academic/nonacademic as a strategy to focus on what is often ignored in research, while at the same time recognizing and considering how the academic and nonacademic are blended and negotiated in practice.

The Internet, with its proliferation of “zines” (online magazines), Web journals, and other creative spaces for niche interests, offers a glimpse at some of the more informal writing practices of young girls. While hidden literacies expressed in such spaces are an important aspect of girls' developing identities, the online context also perpetuates a consumerist society immersed in complex youth advertising campaigns. Here we examine writing spaces created by two teenage girls, “Whispered Secrets” and “Honesty,” Web pages that reside within the gURL.com online community, a popular site for online teens. (Both Web pages were taken down from the site during the writing of this article.)

While this textual space is an important new domain for young adolescents, it contains both the seeds of resistance and a firmly-situated consumerist ideology in its everyday writing of the ordinary. In the following, we consider the contradictions and ironies of identity and literacy practice in such online spaces. These contradictions are analyzed within the spaces created by the girls, and also across the network that links gURL.com to other consumer-oriented Web sites.

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Considering the Literacy Spaces of gURLs

The “zine phenomenon” has been especially significant where communities of writers create their own publications and exchange ideas and thoughts through anonymous networks of readers. gURL.com is a community that has created a space where girls can gather to chat and interact, get free e-mail addresses, or create Web pages; it is also a zine for girls 13 and older. So gURL.com designates a new kind of technological space in which media transcend several different forms. Jenkins (1997) refers to this as “media convergence,” suggesting both promise and peril for the construction of autonomous identities. While there are many opportunities to expand one's sense of self collectively, there are also numerous overlapping incursions on the construction of self through networks of advertising media.

Many girls create their own networks of Web-writing buddies, as in the popular Web rings designed for a particular interest or type of girl. Sites such as ChickClick and gURL.com, however, offer a large network for girls that is already in place; through them girls can easily join a wide-reaching and vibrant online community. While many of these Web pages encourage a resistant kind of writing, it is clear that certain forms of anti-feminist ideology are also being reinforced through these networks of online writers. These writing spaces undermine girls' conceptions of feminism at the same time as they work to construct new and different forms of feminist identity.

At the gURL.com site, girls are inundated with banner advertising every step of the way. They can find out how to travel at hoteldiscounts.com and get an online bank account at wingspanbank.com. Other advertisers include kotex.com, where girls can “be a part of the Kotex connection,” and lifeminders.com, a personal management service for up-and-coming yuppies. Presumably many of these advertisers are hoping to tap in to a potential future market of women.

Both ChickClick and gURL.com bring young girls together and provide a place where demographic data can be obtained about consumer habits. The privacy policy provided by gURL.com includes the following ambiguous disclaimer:

We strive to create contests and content which require a very minimal amount of information from our users. Our online surveys and contests sometimes ask users for contact information (like their email addresses) or information about hobbies or interests.

Indeed, the community spirit seems a bit lacking in the fine-print proviso posted on the site, which indicates that gURL.com has royalty-free rights to the full use of any information on any Web page posted in its domain. Moreover, personal Web pages hosted at the site cannot include advertising of their own. gURL.com owns it all -- and yet takes little responsibility for its ownership and power. As the site owners point out, “You use the gURL Connection and gURL.com at your own risk.”

It is a community created with a particularly effective marketing technique, a place where savvy corporations can work to construct young girls' identities through the consumer artifacts that define their self-expression. These sorts of spaces are rife with contradiction and irony, sending the message that girls “just need to be themselves” at the same time as they tell them to buy the coolest and hippest new fragrance or glitter makeup.

Sites such as gURL.com are spaces of both resistance and conformity. Across their accumulated representations of identity, design, and linked commercial sponsorships they produce “figured worlds” (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998), imagined and simplified places that dramatize, value, and make significant particular identities in practice. As Holland et al. point out, these collective “as if” worlds are sociohistoric, contrived interpretations or imaginations that mediate behavior and so, from the perspective of heuristic development, inform participants' outlooks.

However, “figurings” of consumer-based identity are not merely appropriated without being transformed through their interaction with Web-based constructions of the self. Rather, literacy and identity practices on the Web can be understood as tied up with the process of remediation (Grusin, 2000). Rather than simply bringing together old media, new digital media such as the Web operate by “borrowing from, paying homage to, critiquing, and refashioning” other media (Grusin, p. 48). Both media and social spaces are remediated: television, film, print, and also places such as cities, parks, and shopping malls, are collected, combined, and transformed in the spaces of the Web. To understand the possibilities of identity construction and literacy practice on the Web we must consider the ways in which familiar media -- such as the magazine -- are transformed for and on the Web by being combined and juxtaposed with other media and social spaces.

Amidst powerful consumer ideology, new spaces on the Web are already having a strong and positive effect on some young girls' writing practices through global interactions and camaraderie developed out of shared interests. Indeed, writing on the Web has been a part of the reappropriation of the word girl (often spelled by the girls themselves as “grrrl” or “gurl”) by those looking for a return to the enjoyment of femininity after the backlash of the 1980s. gURL.com plays on this new spelling by highlighting “URL,” the Web acronoym for uniform resource locator (or Web site address).

Takayoshi (1999) argues that “Web-based writing, with its potential for immediate and personal response from readers authentically interested in the writing, can be engaging and meaningful” (p. 104) and especially useful for the development of communication skills, enhancing students' sense of self-worth and recognition. Moreover, online writing allows new or developing identities to be tried out in the safety of the virtual space, where the isolated peer groups that many girls find themselves attached to in their schools can be resisted (Turkle, 1995) and the customs and codes of authority figures and overbearing role models can be kept at a distance. As one girl writes on her Web page at gURL.com, “they can't stop you from dreaming...or writing” in reference to the “things your parents shouldn't know.” Ironically this writing expresses both a kind of resistance and a growing complacence in the wake of the hegemonic bombardment of advertising.

As Finders' (1997) work on hidden literacies suggests, writing on the bathroom wall and passing notes behind teachers' backs are practices that resist authority and subvert the goals of institutions in favor of personal goals. But a large amount of this writing is also very much within a patriarchal view of femininity. Notes, for the most part, are superficial in content, having to do with topics such as how boring the class is or what their writers want to do later with their friends. Writing on the bathroom wall is more indicative of resistance, but not agency: it often takes the form of petty and mean comments about other students. Furthermore, as far as reading teen magazines is concerned, the outcome is also contradictory. According to Christian-Smith's (1998) work on popular texts and femininity, young girls reading of teen romance and teen fiction is a kind of literacy, but these texts themselves represent “packaged desire” in that they create subjectivities through the desire for material goods.

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Honesty and Whispered Secrets

In “Honesty,” the author, who identifies herself as “K.,” provides a highly detailed page that describes herself, in the manner of many personal Web pages with “vital statistics” style content. K.'s page reveals that she was born in 1987 and is white, her astrological sign is cancer, she doesn't do drugs, and she uses Suave shampoo, Secret deodorant, and plain dental floss. Some of her favorite television shows are Dawson's Creek and Friends. Her favorite magazine is Teen People and she prefers Pepsi. The list goes on and on, detailing facts such as the color of her toothbrush and whether she paints her nails.

While this is an extreme example of the “About Me” page, it does describe a person very much caught up in a self-definition created through practices of consumption. Her preferences and beliefs have to do with shoe size and body piercing. Her philosophy of life is “Be selfish.” Nevertheless, she describes herself as beautiful “if not in body, in spirit,” and appears to have a fairly healthy and rich sense of who she is. She is a “believer” and a “survivor” as well as a “child” and a “woman.”

The author of the “Whispered Secrets” Web pages captures a similar sense of crafting ideals and lifestyle amidst naming and appropriating consumer products. The manner in which ideals, practices, and products are blended, phrase by phrase, suggests how they are tightly woven in discursive self-fashioning:

I am a teenage girl, growing up in the new millenium [sic], with high hopes and aspirations for the future. I do not like stereotypes and racists, and I dream of one day having a profound effect on the world. I love horror novels, and I am a McDonald's fanatic. My favorite drink is Sprite, and I love to go on hikes and to chill with my friends.

The writer's identification with McDonalds and Sprite seems particularly important as an “About Me” self-introduction on the Web. Such consumer identifications, building upon business dominance of the Web, may be a means of establishing common ground or imagined community with McDonalds and Sprite enthusiasts (Anderson, 1991). The Web provides a common means of communication and commerce, which is personalized and localized within constructions of the self.

K.'s Web page includes what she titles “An Open Letter to So-and-So,” in which she uses the online space to rant, to express upsetting emotions, and to work through some of the issues she comes across in her peer group, as well as her romantic interests:

I wish I had the courage to tell you how I really feel. I'm trying, I'm honestly trying to find it within myself to tell you.

If I can't tell you all of how I feel, I can at least tell you this much: you are my best friend. I came to that realization accidentally a few days ago, when I wrote about you in my journal.... I'm kind of scared to admit even that, but it's out there now and I don't feel like going back on what I've written. I know full well you'll probably never be (un)lucky enough to stumble across it anyway.

I really look forward to spending time with you in the future, maybe as more than just friends. THERE! I GOT IT! I DID IT!! I LIKE YOU!! ARE YOU HAPPY NOW!!

K.'s online space helps her to resist the person she is used to being, to break into a new and better person who is able to express her desires, even if only for an anonymous audience. While she is very much caught up in a consumer definition of self, she expresses herself in her zine over and against her more shy self at school and comes to understand a part of herself through her writing about others.

In one poem, she describes her English class and how the kind of traditional literacy that is required by schools leaves her feeling bored and restless:

I sit in English class,
Staring at my book.
The letters seem to move a bit, so I take another look.
Suddenly I find myself
In a letter-filled-up land,
I grab a few, they spell out NOUN
While resting in my hand.
I screamed and screamed and screamed again,
Trapped with the letters here,
And after screaming eighteen times,
Got back to sitting on my rear.

K.'s poem illustrates how cyberspace is not a “parallel universe,” as some enthusiasts have argued (critiqued by Grusin, 2000). Rather, K. imports the familiar social space of the English classroom in the poem and transforms it, refashioning and embedding her experience of schooling within the space of the zine. While schooling is a “letter-filled-up land,” her alternative space of the Web page is itself filled with letter-wrought images of schooling.

In another poem, K. expresses her dislike of driving with her father:

I hate my father's car.
It smells like gum and Cigarettes,
And he keeps it too warm.
The radio is just loud enough
So you notice it's on,
But to [sic] soft to break the silence

Both poems suggest a growing person who feels the pressure of authority and the need to rebel. A sensibility is created through these writings that is not just another form of crude resistance but rather casts an alternative state of consciousness. She describes not so much feeling bored, but that unearthly state where letters seem to rise off the page and take on a sentience of their own. Perhaps her friends might feel the same way, but the creation of a poem and its publication on the Web signals a larger desire to create the self in a wider and more diverse social pool. The poem expresses not just the passing boredom of nothing better to do, but a real thought experiment through which writing is used to express a small piece of the soul and the experiences of everyday reality.

The last stanza of the driving with Dad poem is particularly representative of the kind of critical awareness that this author has generated through her writing. “The radio is just loud enough / So you notice it's on, / But to soft to break the silence” indicates a special sense of personal space and comfort zones through the use of music. But it also suggests something more, something not completely spelled out in the poem -- K.'s relationship with her father. It is as if she is expressing the awkwardness and distance she feels with her father. Thus, the poem speaks to another deeper sense of self expressed through writing for a larger audience.

The zine provides authors with access to a broader range of ideas, values, and relationships than may be available within their school culture. Titles of works and Web pages within gURL, including “Honesty” and “Whispered Secrets,” are themselves suggestive of a somewhat contradictory relation to a public and private self and public and private audiences. The author of “Whispered Secrets” describes this relation as follows:

I named this page “Whispered Secrets” because at first, I planned only to have a few select people know about it. But, someone told someone, which lead [sic] to this: everyone knew about it. And it reminded me of a secret, because no matter how silently you whisper, the words always manage to make it to someone else. Perfect title, right? MANY thanks to you, the visitor, for stopping by. I appreciate any comments you may have, and I will accept any thoughts, comments, ideas, or suggestions here.

The author writes as if she no longer has control -- others find out about her secret self despite attempts at whispering. And yet, this whispered self is accompanied by an appeal to others to give feedback. The author is both a disclosing private self and a strategic editor for a reading public: “I am making this page to express myself, and everything inside this site was made by me, the editor.”

Typically, guestbooks at one Web page have a space where visitors can write a message as well as post a link to their own Web page, so writing on another's Web page can act as a advertisement for one's own page at the same time as it promotes a network or community of young writers. As one guest writes in response to the author of ”Whispered Secrets,“

hey. i just found your site tonight. your writing [is] so beautiful. i love the way u write. you sound very real. and true to yourself. anyway i have to go, bye. *amy* P.S. can you guys check out my site? if u do please sign the guestbook. my writing isn't all that great (its just a diary) but hopefully it will improve.

Entries like this can be quite meaningful as they represent anonymous and objective opinions in the minds of many young authors. The compliment is coming from neither a friend nor a teacher, from someone who does not necessarily have anything to gain by writing to the author except the joy of meeting someone new with similar tastes and experiences. These kinds of connections can be highly motivating for young girls attempting to make sense of their contradictory and complex lives and, as a result, can increase their sense of power and self-identity.

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“We're Not Working Alone”

To what extent does “worldwide” describe activity on the Web? Grusin and others argue that it is a misperception that the Web is establishing a truly global economy or global form of information exchange:

The electronic networks form a communication superstructure that allows for a fast and easy exchange of data over large distances. But the way in which people use these networks is strongly determined by the local contexts in which they live, so that, as a social and cultural space, the electronic networks are not so much a global but a translocal structure. (Knowbotic Research, 1998, p. 194, cited in Grusin, 2000, p. 61)

While the World Wide Web may be considered global in an idealized technical form (particularly if we ignore vast differences among geographies and economies), and while any site may potentially be linked to any other, it is also helpful to attend to the details of specific practices and particular local online configurations in order to understand the everyday sorts of activities and resistances that are experienced on a micro level via the Web. But online literacy practices might be best conceived as “glocalized” (Kraidy, 1999), as bringing into high relief the ways in which global and local spaces and identities form complex hybrids.

In this section we turn to some of the ways in which gURL.com participates in a particular configuration of Web sites, rather than simply being amorphously connected to an abstract World Wide Web. Rather than considering texts and contexts within the site, we shift to an analysis of some of the more macro relations between the gURL.com site and the iTurf network to which it belongs, relations that underlie the writing practices and spatial experiences of the gURL.com community.

iTurf is a powerful discursive formation (Foucault, 1972) embodying a relationship among materials, beliefs, language practices, and identity. iTurf hosts and sponsors the gURL.com site. As such a formation, iTurf promotes and coordinates a particular social order, one that is associated with writing practices and the development of community. Nevertheless, while iTurf coordinates particular relations of power, knowledge, commerce, and identity, it also contains significant tensions and contradictions and cannot be considered as a single unitary network. In particular, there are many divergent identity positions available for girls within the iTurf network as it hosts gURL.com within it.

The hub of the iTurf network, iTurf.com, describes its relationship to its eight networked Web sites as follows:

We're not working alone. iTurf.com is part of the iTurf network, a leading provider of online destinations for ages 13-24. Through its network of websites, iTurf provides a comprehensive selection of community, content, and commerce services that includes interactive magazines, proprietary content, chat rooms, posting boards, personal homepages, email, and online shopping.

About half of the iTurf Web sites are commercial, including an online clothing store for teen girls and a clothing store with “urban-inspired clothes for guys.” The iTurf network is an online translation of the shopping mall for teens, where purchasing and viewing consumer goods come together with chat, friendship, hanging out, and social news. Yet, the shopping mall space is transformed online and juxtaposed in relation to other spaces, including personal Web pages hosted by iTurf servers, e-mail exchanges, zines, and iTurf contests. Offering vacations and new cars to registered network participants, iTurf both purchases and markets youth culture in a way that is unique and under-researched. In exchange for ever-changing information about participants from a variety of sources, including content posted on personal Web pages, iTurf provides access to an online community and the necessary commercial products through which teens can identify each other as members of a certain consumer community. For businesses, iTurf exchanges terabytes of youth culture, as well as a vast youth market, for online commerce. Both young people and commercial interests, therefore, enter into relations of production, consumption, and communal exchange through their participation on iTurf network sites.

As the “largest proprietary online network for teens and young adults,” the iTurf network is a significant configuration in which youth culture is negotiated, produced, and marketed. According to a May 2000 iTurf business wire, annual unique visitors to the iTurf network grew to nearly 3 million in the first quarter of 2000. Revenue in 1999 increased fivefold from 1998, to US$24.8 million. iTurf, as a “leading provider of Internet community, content and commerce services for Generation Y,” boasted in September 1999 that its network of Web sites reached 13 percent of all girls between the ages of 12 and 17 on the Web, traffic claimed to be five times that of its nearest direct competitors. The “reach” among boys aged 12 to 17 is considerably smaller at 2.6 percent, yet still exceeds the nearest competitor. In its privacy statement, iTurf claims that they “do not disclose personal information to any party beyond the iTurf network,” but the network itself includes many commercial enterprises.

While the various relations between iTurf and other networks could also be discussed at length, we will mention only one. A news release dated June 29, 2000, describes a developing relationship with Yahoo.com, perhaps the best known information directory on the Web. In this relationship, Yahoo! Chat2 will host gURL.com's chat events once per month, which will allow the network to “showcase the gURL experience to an even larger community of teens across the nation who are looking for a place to voice their opinions, share their concerns and express their creativity.” Thus iTurf's domain is far-reaching, as is their access to the needs, desires, and dreams of young female teens.

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iTurf's Contradictory Positions

A closer look at some of the activities that reside within the iTurf network reveals that contradictory positions interpellate girls from various media sources and types. From gURL.com, users can readily follow graphical links to the iTurf network, where, aside from commercial sites, they can, for example, enter Spark.com and take its “Slut Test”:

Ever been called a tramp? A strumpet? A whore? Well, prove that person right or wrong by taking the Slut Test at the Spark.com.

Women's bodies and sexual behavior are often the subject of “humor and entertainment” on Spark.com and ontap.com, “a leading young men's site” where one is whisked automatically to some helpful advice on how to prevent sex, such as “think about baseball.” Texts, chats, and images of sex and women's bodies, readily and often seamlessly linked to gURL.com through iTurf, compel us to consider the ironies and contradictions of body and sexuality within the network. While gURL.com boasts an “open and understanding environment” in which issues of beauty, sexual behavior, and satisfaction with one's body are often figured as a form of power through information in the “gURL experience,” within the “entertainment” experience of Spark.com and ontap.com, women's bodies and sexuality are the subjects of critique, colonization, and dismemberment. Moreover, continuing a pattern found in many women's magazines, Web sites for girls and networks geared for teens are in the business of constructing discernible oppositions between masculinity and femininity in order to establish distinct marketing groups.

In the following text from ontap.com by Christian Rudder, also a writer for Spark.com, the author imagines a woman's breasts as the star of a new TV show, and accompanies his text with relevant photos:

Fox revealed that the breasts of Party of Five's Jennifer Love-Hewitt will be leaving the show in the upcoming season. The continuing adventures of the starlet's chest will be spun-off in a new show tentatively called Party of Two. A spokesman for the breasts confirmed the shift, and emphasized their enthusiasm for the new project, chuckling, “I know two nipples that are very erect today.” In explaining the change, Fox executives noted that the twin mammaries have been Party of Five's most popular characters for years and that, “They'd literally outgrown the show.”

Rudder's parody continues to describe how the breasts will team up with the Olsen Twins from Full House, who will “ride Love-Hewitt's breasts around the city solving crimes against women.” The manner in which the text dismembers and personifies womens body parts, the manner in which it trivializes crimes against women, and the manner in which it represents the control of women's bodies by Fox television executives is characteristic of ontap.com's representations of women -- and, of course, of many representations of women in patriarchal culture.

Here, however, our particular interest and concern is not the text itself so much as the intercontextual, networked relation of this text to gendered texts in gURL.com. How are girls constructed and positioned in gURL.com, a space for girls? How are girls constructed in ontap.com, a space for boys? What are the contradictions and ironies of participating in these spaces, in the closely intertwined, laminated, and seamless relations within a single network?

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Directions for Further Study

The negotiation of contradictions and ironies among networked Web sites, as a form of participant practice, needs to be the subject of ongoing study. To understand adolescent identity and literacy practices within online spaces we must trace how teens participate, resist, and negotiate identity through links between sites, and better understand how powerful yet contradictory configurations, such as the iTurf network, are practiced, appropriated, and resisted. As an environment, the Web offers a pedagogically ideal site from which to consider how textual interpretation involves competing discourses and contradictory positions.

If we propose that readers may not produce personal interpretations out of their individual experiences so much as produce readings which are positioned by particular sets of values and beliefs...then we can begin to reconceptualize reading as a social practice.... Conceptualizing readers in this way provides a space from which to argue that readers are historically located in conflicting, competing, and often contradictory discourses. Readers construct readings, not as originators of meaning, but as human subjects positioned through social, political, and economic discursive practices that remain the location over a constant struggle over power. (Patterson et al., 1994, p. 66, cited in Alvermann, 1998, p. 367)

Our research indicates how resistance and ideology are, in some ways, interconnected in their effects and practices. While the Web provides a space for writing activities that presents new opportunities for the construction of identity and the realization of agency, it also provides immediate and direct access to ideological influences that position online writers as consumers, as objects of consumption.

As research into online spaces for adolescents continues, those of us committed to critical literacy education must help students make sense of the ways in which particular sites position them among contradictory discourses and relations of power. We are in need of developing a pedagogy of critical Web site interpretation, a means of evaluation that moves well beyond traditional categories used with informational texts (e.g., source, purpose, authorship, and credibility). Rather, evaluation must be engaged in understanding Web sites as positioning readers and writers.

Among other questions, we must ask to whom Web sites appear to be addressed, or deliberately not addressed, and which gaps or silences they support. In doing so, readers should not be cast as powerless within the larger networks of media and technology, but rather as negotiating a presence within the gaps of such new spaces. Moreover, to interpret how sites function within particular networks -- rather than within an amorphous and ideal World Wide Web -- we need to help students study and consider site-site relations. As with any text, students need to understand the implicit and explicit ways in which Web sites “are not working alone.”

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References

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About the Authors

Barbara Duncan is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Kentucky in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation. She works in the area of philosophy of education with special interests in feminism, technology, and media. Her dissertation, Feminism, Ideology, and Resistance: Media Convergence and the Negotiation of a New Girl Order, explores the expansion of technology and the convergence of media in relation to feminist alternative publications and communities.

Kevin Leander (e-mail kevin.leander@vanderbilt.edu) is an assistant professor of language and literacy in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University. His areas of research include sociocultural and critical approaches to language and literacy among adolescents, writing practices, and new literacy technologies. He is working on a critical analysis of classroom discourse through theories of social space.

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Citation: Duncan, B., & Leander, K. (2000, November). Girls just wanna have fun: Literacy, consumerism, and paradoxes of position on gURL.com. Reading Online, 4(5). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/electronic/elec_index.asp?HREF=/electronic/duncan/index.html

Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted November 2000
© 2000 International Reading Association, Inc.   ISSN 1096-1232