Abstract

Messages embedded within media are powerful ideological forces influencing ways girls perceive and negotiate the world and their selves, setting standards, expectations, ideals and norms. From a neo-Gramscian perspective, popular culture is a site of negotiation for a girl's meaning making and construction of self. Over the course of this dissertation, seven teenage girls between the ages of 12 and 14 years offer a glimpse into their private lives as they reflect upon their relationships with popular culture. Through photo-ethnography, and video documented focus group and photo elicitation interviews, the girls discuss issues, personal attributes, and meaningful experiences, and demonstrate how they construct a sense of self amongst the hegemonic forces of peers, family, and societal values mediated by the media and popular culture. As I continue to witness the cultural, social and political girl "come together" through the site of popular culture, the more I realize this site's value as a gateway for meaningful, critical, and transformative media-based art education with an emphasis on self-actualization and social action. Using popular culture to engage girls in critical, reflective and reflexive dialogue provided me with a working framework to understand how each constructed her sense of self amongst others. I have discovered that much like a collage, constructed and juxtaposed piece by piece, everything a girl values becomes, in essence, layers in her self-portrait, and a mirror to her self. There are educational and research implications pointing towards reframing my research methodology for the classroom, adding a fourth step, art-based video documentary production, and inviting girls to consider and transform what limits their potential through meaningful media production.