REVISITING GIRLS’ STUDIES Girls creating sites for connection and action Sharon R. Mazzarella and Norma Pecora Good girls, bad girls, schoolgirls, Ophelias, third wavers, no wavers, B girls, riot grrrls, cybergURLs, queen bees, tweenies, Girlies: Young women seem to be everywhere. (Harris, 2004, p. xvii) So begins Anita Harris’s recent collection of essays on girl culture. As Harris implies, girls, girl culture, 1 and concern for girls (e.g. ‘‘Ophelias,’’ ‘‘queen bees’’) are everywhere— the focus of adult attention, news coverage, media portrayals, and academic study—a phenomenon that first peaked in the 1990s. During the 1990s, all one needed to do was to pick up a newspaper or the bestseller du jour (e.g. Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia, 1994) to get a sense of the public’s concern for girls. Girls, we were told, were a generation in crisis, a generation in need of adult intervention and academic study (e.g. Winter, 1997). Indeed, the 1990s ushered in a deluge of high-profile studies of adolescent girls’ development, most highlighting the perceived state of crisis of girls in the United States at that point in time. Depending on the study, we were advised that girls were experiencing problems with school performance, self-esteem, and/or body image (e.g. American Association of University Women, 1991; Brown & Gilligan, 1992; Brumberg, 1997; Orenstein, 1994; Pipher, 1994; Sadker & Sadker, 1994). Not surprisingly, the US news media caught wind of many of these studies resulting in the publication of a wealth of articles pointing out the problems facing girls (Mazzarella & Pecora, 2007). From their analysis of US newspaper coverage of adolescent girls’ lives in the late 1990s, Mazzarella and Pecora (2007) concluded that: ‘‘Although not scapegoating girls for broader social problems, it is clear that the press constructed girls themselves as a social problem’’ (p. 21). Interestingly, if we are to believe the latest round of best-selling books in the US and accompanying headlines, the current crisis facing girls is the so-called ‘‘mean girl’’ phenomenon. Named after the highly-popular film of the same name, 2 and following on the heels of well-publicized books (e.g. Garbarino, 2006; Prothrow-Stith & Spivak, 2005b; Simmons, 2003; Wiseman, 2003), newspapers now feature headlines such as ‘‘Beyond Mean Girls Why Young Females are Fighting More’’ (Prothrow-Stith & Spivak, 2005a). Marnina Gonick (2004) has argued that this ‘‘explosion of popular, professional and academic interest in, and concern about, ‘the mean girl’’’ is linked to the more general ‘‘public anxiety and cultural fascination with girls and girlhood’’ (p. 395). In response to this ‘‘public anxiety and cultural fascination,’’ academic studies of girls, which took on a new sense of urgency during the 1990s, are booming, but the emphasis has shifted slightly so that the discourse is no longer linked primarily to crisis. In this article, we begin by revisiting the groundwork established by girls’ studies foremothers Carol Gilligan (psychology) and Angela McRobbie (cultural studies). Then we Journal of Children and Media, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2007 ISSN 1748-2798 print/1748-2801 online/07/020105-21 ß 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17482790701339118