I recently contributed to the Rayanne Project, an online dialogue about adolescent girl identities that takes My So-Called Life's Rayanne Graff as its focal point. This kind of retrospection is important, especially given how superficially teenage girlhood is defined in the larger conversion about girls: mostly as a series of embarrassing moments, embarrassing questions, and romantic rejections. The anecdotes have been recycled and tweaked throughout the decades.
What I admire about the Rayanne Project is that it offers women currently in their twenties (an interesting age, I think: post-college, pre-everything else) a chance to think critically about their pasts beyond trite nostalgia and fashion throwbacks. The expression of this kind of cohort communalism has, at least in my generation, been largely ungendered and centered around Nickelodeon. It's remarkable, though, that Nickelodeon so successfully exemplified 1990s kid culture through a mix of girl and boy protagonists equilibrated to appeal to both sexes: I related to Doug as much as I did to Clarissa Darling. A closer look at our engagement with these specific ideas and objects offer an understanding of childhood and adolescence as historically contingent; not unchanging and cliche.
No comments:
Post a Comment