Girlhood Stories: What can(‘t) stories about girls do?. 16th November 16:00.

 Girlhood Stories: What can(‘t) stories about girls do? 

The St Andrews Institute for Gender Studies is delighted that Catherine Mackenzie will be delivering the StAIGS Seminar on Thursday the 16^th of November. The talk is titled: Girlhood Stories: What can(‘t) stories about girls do? The abstract is copied below.  

 The talk will take place from 4pm to 5.30pm, on Thursday the 16^th of November, in the Arts Seminar 7 in the Arts Building (ARB: 317).  

Catherine (Kate) Mackenzie is a 4^th Year PhD researcher in the School of Modern Languages at the University of St Andrews, with supervision also at the University of Strathclyde (Dr Elaine Webster, School of Law).  Kate’s PhD research is on Imagining Children’s Rights in Central Africa: Francophone Fiction and State Discourse since 1999.   She takes a post-colonial approach to analyse how such texts reflect differing conceptions of childhood and shed light on the tensions inherent in the relationship of the child to the adult, the individual to the state, and African nations to the international human rights regime. 

 Abstract: My work brings together representations of childhood in international children’s rights law and in four francophone African novels. I do not set one against the other, but rather use law as a lens to explore fictional representations of childhood and vice versa. A question which runs through my analysis is: what does narrative bring to understanding of childhood and of children’s rights? Here, I focus on stories and rights of girls. 

 The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child ((1990) set out the rights of everyone under age 18. For ‘the child’ of the UN Convention, sex is irrelevant; the Convention bars discrimination, but makes no direct mention of girls (or boys). The African Charter makes brief mention of girls in relation to education. Beyond that, there is no suggestion in either treaty that the needs, vulnerabilities, capacity to access rights for girls are any different than for boys. In rights terms, if female sex is significant, then girls are ‘becoming women’, their rights addressed by women’s rights law.   

 In the two novels in my study with girl protagonists, the girls’ female sex is central to their lives. In Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga, adolescent girls are seen as becoming-women, -wives, -mothers. In Johnny Mad Dog, by Emmanuel Dongala, the girl protagonist starts as cared for child, emerges into the role of protective mother to a younger child. In both novels, girls who are having consensual sex are portrayed as outside ‘proper’ childhood. That is, both stories depict girlhood as uneasily straddling childhood and womanhood within societies significantly structured around sex. 

For my analysis, stories of girlhood make visible i) the significance of sex, elided in children’s rights law and discourse, and ii) the ways in which the experience and social understanding of girlhood is shaped by impending womanhood. The separation in human rights law of girls’ rights as children and as female is shown to reflect a wider social ambivalence (with North/South dimensions) around girlhood and the material and social link between girlhood, womanhood and potential motherhood. 

There is a further question: what can stories do for girls? In both novels, the girl protagonists are inspired by the real or imagined stories of strong women. The notion of ‘relatable’ role models is ubiquitous in children’s rights/development discourse. The girl protagonist of Johnny Mad Dog is herself discussed as a role model in educational editions of the novel (though she is invisible in the title and the cover illustrations of most editions). Her own role model, the real life African American scientist and astronaut Mae Jemison, is the subject of dozens of ‘inspirational’ books for children. At the same time, both real life and fictional stories, especially of the marginalised, may be critiqued as objectifying. Do girlhood stories challenge or inevitably function within existing power dynamics? – a question Dongala has female characters explore in relation to stories of sexual violence. I invite discussion.