Girlstories

Katharine Kittredge (4 credits)

Girlstories is a new Summer College offering, and we are excited to be able to share one of our popular Ithaca College Freshman Seminars with you. Girlstories blends literature with cultural studies, women’s studies, and film and cinema studies. Students in this course will explore how girls and girlhoods are represented across all of these media, and work hands-on to create new media reflections on this theme.

The course focus ranges from canonical literature (for example books by Toni Morrison, June Jordan and Dorothy Allison) to popular culture, like Disney's images of girls in film. Images of Buffy and Twilight’s Bella are also excellent ways to start thinking about girlstories.

Professor Kittredge takes a chronological view of girlhoods, starting with folk and fairy tales from western and non-western cultures (like Grimm’s Fairy Tales), and then moving on to 18th and 19th century diaries, periodicals, and “conduct literature”. (A large number of books were published form the 1600s to the 1900s instructing women how to behave both publicly and privately, and the conduct literature genre plays an important role in how society perceives ‘femininity’.)

From this early look, Professor Kittredge moves to the 20th century, and together students look at messages emerging from places like 1940s Hollywood, 1960s Disney films, Seventeen magazine from the 1970s to today, and even instructional film strips made in the 1950s that presented topics on hygiene and sexuality.

The last week of class addresses contemporary messages including Weetzie Bat (by Francesa Lia Block), Speak, lesbian coming-out stories, Wild Child (by Chelsea Cain), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Professor Kittredge is a faculty member in the English Department and in Women's Studies program at Ithaca College.