Authoring identity and agency through the arts

This study is a reconsideration of and response to the predominant research on women's and girls' development that suggests adolescence is a time when cultural messages and school curricula limit how girls view themselves---their sense of identity---and how they take principled actions---their agency (AAUW, 1992; Belenky et al., 1986; Brown & Gilligan, 1992; Gilligan 1986; Gilligan et al., 1990; Orenstein, 1994; Pipher, 1996; 1996; Rogers, 1993; Sadker & Sadker, 1994). This fourteen-month study of three adolescent girls involved in a community arts program called Artists in Residence (AIR) demonstrates how the arts provide opportunities for working-class girls to overcome cultural silencing and author new identities and forms of agency.; Based on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that integrates the works of Lev Vygotsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Pierre Bourdieu with critical feminist theory, this study provides a map (Chapter Two) for understanding the ways in which participation in the arts offers girls "mediational" tools (Vygotsky, 1971, 1976, 1986), opportunities for "self authoring" (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986), and needed "capital" (Bourdieu, 1990, 1993) to alter identity and agency.; To describe what participation in the arts looked like in AIR, how it functioned in girls' lives, and what it produced, qualitative data were collected from July 1998--August 1999 using ethnographic methods, including participation, observation, interviews, questionnaires, and focus groups. Data collection and analysis were framed by Bourdieu's (1990, 1992, 1993) three interdependent contexts of social relations---the sociocultural, interpersonal, and personal contexts---and were focused on the negotiated interactions and meanings among these contexts (Chapter Three).; The findings represent the dynamic relationship among these contexts. They present sociocultural and interpersonal contexts of AIR (Chapter Four), the girls' personal contexts from their points of view, and interpretations of these in relation to their interpersonal and sociocultural contexts (Chapters Five, Six, and Seven). The implications and conclusions of this study (Chapter Eight) reveal how participation in the arts enables working-class girls to speak and be heard. The discussion focuses on the potential of the arts to shift girls' constructions of identity and agency by providing cultural tools and strategies for critical reflection, making alternative meanings about self and world, using arts to communicate with others, and gaining capital to create new forms of agency.