The other girls: Culture, psychoanalytic theories and writing

This paper presents a psychoanalytic theory of girlhood linked to a cultural theory of writing. It is a result of an ethnographic study of schooling, where the development of theory links to the immersion of the researcher in the research. There are two expansions of psychoanalytic theory. The first is a feminist poststructural critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis,with the possibility of the existence of a third or tertiary split, as writing eventuates. The second is an extended theory of mothering, through the complex relationships evidenced by girls to women and girls to each other. These theoretical developments are based on a theory of writing that is a poststructural theory of decentred graphics, which accommodates the phonic, the semiotic and the discursive. These theories, with their cultural implications, may be applied beyond the particular ethnography from which they come. In turn they designate knowledge, power, fantasy and desire.