Reference Reviews
Doug’s Student Reference Room
Girl Culture: an Encyclopedia, edited by Claudia A. Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh. 2 vols. 702p. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-313-33908-0. $185.
On the front cover of this two-volume set, a group of four or five teenage girls scrunch together tightly, competing for space as they primp before a mirror. The girl in the foreground holds a compact in one hand and applies lip gloss with the other; her face is heavily made up and her blouse exposes a bare midriff that shows off a pierced naval. On the back cover, four girls pose in their soccer uniforms for a photo in a high school locker room. They drape their arms around each other, as comfortable with their smiles and each other as they are with their athleticism. These contrasting scenes only begin to illustrate the complexity of the topic of girl culture. Edited by Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, authors of the outstanding Seven Going on Seventeen: Tween Studies in the Culture of Girlhood, this encyclopedia includes contributions from 144 authors with expertise in the field and offers a comprehensive examination of girl culture. The first section consists of 14 academic essays on a range of serious issues focusing on girls and girl culture, including chapters on what it means to be a girl in the 21st century, how to study girl culture, girls’ literacy practices, girl gamers, Barbie culture, girlhood and race and girlhood in the time of AIDS. These essays provide a framework to which readers may return as they explore the second section, “Girl Culture A to Z,” which includes more than 250 entries on topics about beauty and body issues, literature, celebrities and icons, clothing and fashion, comics, digital culture, dolls and toys, film, identities and stereotypes, music, rites of passage, social interaction, television and more. When flipping through this section, I noticed Britney Spears was given three pages, while anorexia merited just over a page, and I wondered at the way topics were prioritized. When I read the entry for Spears, though, I realized that it was cross-referenced with over a dozen other topics, some superficial—hot pants, Backstreet Boys—and others more complex—tweens, innocence, celebrity bad girls. Further inspection revealed a consistent pattern: the editors of this encyclopedia manage to interweave the trappings of girls’ pop culture with the most enduring issues about youth and gender. This outstanding encyclopedia can be used as a resource in English, sociology, health and history classes and as a valuable information source for independent research. Highly recommended for high school, public and academic libraries.
—Doug Achterman