Hailing the hero: Critical cultural studies, subjectivity and girls in vocational high school.

Abstract

Language allows us to narrate our stories. Creating ourselves as subjects is a function of language practices mobilized in complex and contradictory negotiations of the texts we engage, in the contexts in which they appear. This qualitative, interpretive study examines how seven, grade nine, female adolescent girls engage popular culture texts and practices to constitute themselves subjectively in vocational high school. The study shows that discursive representations of gender, desire, race and class critically inform and are informed by female adolescents' negotiation of their everyday lived experiences. In particular, it finds that female adolescents engage the discursive practice of anger to name their being and becoming.