Colby professor to present tech-assisted talk on ‘girlfighting’ at UMaine

ORONO – Lyn Mikel Brown will report on her research about girls’ relationships with a presentation, “Girlfighting: Betrayal, Teasing and Rejection Among Girls,” 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, June 1, in Soderberg Center at the University of Maine.

With the aid of compressed video technology and the Internet, Brown’s talk may also be attended at the Hutchinson Center in Belfast and in Luther Bonney Hall at the University of Southern Maine. This system will allow participants at the remote sites to interact with participants in Orono.

Brown is an associate professor of women’s studies education and human development at Colby College and a 2001-02 scholar-in-residence at UMaine.

During her year at UMaine, her research among girls ages 5 to 20 sought to understand how girls’ friendships can be both supportive and destructive and to develop strategies to encourage healthy relationships among girls. She is currently completing a book detailing her research; it is due to be published next spring.

Brown’s scholar-in-residence appointment was funded by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation. This presentation is sponsored by UMaine’s Women’s Resource Center. A videostream of the presentation will be available online shortly after the conference at the Women’s Resource Center Web site at www.umaine.edu.wrc.

“Girlfighting is such a widespread phenomenon, a central feature of girls’ friendships and peer relationships – and it’s greatly understudied,” said Brown. “In spite of the attention it’s received of late, there are very few research studies that invite girls to talk about their experiences with and understandings of girlfighting. And as far as I know, there is no study that documents the social development of girlfighting as this study does.”

Brown’s presentation examines the contradictory themes in girls’ relationships.

For instance, the way girls depend on close, intimate friendships is juxtaposed against the dark undersides of those friendships which include talking behind each other’s backs, teasing and torturing one another, policing clothing and body size, and fighting over real or imagined relationships with boys.

Brown argues that too often girlfighting is over pressure girls feel to conform to the norms and rules of idealized femininity. Girls threaten other girls who do not match up to these ideals with rejection and exclusion and thus unwittingly reinforce gender and racial stereotypes.

“What surprised me in my research was how much girls understood about the damages and root causes of girlfighting and how they still voluntarily participated in it. Girlfighting is about something much larger than individual girls – it’s about narrow ideals of femininity and gendered scripts that reduce girls to their appearance and the sum of their intimate relationships,” Brown says.

Brown also contends that social structures enforce girls’ subordination and dismiss girlfighting as of minor consequence. Brown will share practical methods adults can use against the destructive effects of girlfighting – once they have gained an awareness of it.

Those methods include thinking about the messages adults send to girls about what a girl is supposed to be like; helping girls be conscious of the ways advertisers, movies, magazines and television promote narrow images of femininity and beauty; and to understand that when girls fight it is because they want to feel powerful, be visible and be respected.

Brown is a nationally recognized scholar on women’s issues. She received her doctorate from Harvard University, where she was a founding member of the Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development.

Her book, co-authored with Carol Gilligan, “Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development,” was a 1992 New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Her second book, “Raising Their Voices: The Politics of Girls’ Anger,” is a study of Maine girls and their class-related expressions of anger and resistance to conventions of femininity.

For more information about attending the presentation at the Orono site, please contact either Jennie Todd or Sharon Barker at the Women’s Resource Center, 581-1501, or jennie@umit.maine.edu.