Listening to girls: discursive positioning and the construction of self

Recent decades have seen a proliferation of books that ‘listen in’ on the everyday lives of girls. In their research the authors maintain that ‘listening’ to girls in order to make claims about what they ‘heard’ is a theoretically mediated process, and therefore it is not as straightforward as many authors imply. The purpose of this paper is to explore what they call the ‘symptomatic reading’ of interview transcripts. While attending to the contradiction and inconsistencies that characterize interview texts, they also recognize stabilizing strategies—what they call ‘trump discourses’—that make social life possible. Such a way of working enables us to see how power works through discourse. It helps us understand why many girls express a feminist Subjectivity, while distancing themselves from the identity as ‘feminist.’