Daughtering: Girls, their feminism, and their mothers

Abstract

This dissertation examines the everyday political lives of girls in the era of the spectacularized activist girl. It explores how girls negotiate and feel about their activism, their place within ongoing social movements, and their relationships with their mothers and communities. From September 2021 to April 2022, I conducted a series of semi-structured in-depth Zoom interviews with ten activist daughters (aged 11-20) residing in Canada, as well as their mothers and mother figures. The overarching goal of this project is to complicate popular images of girl activists as singular, heroic, and exceptional by centring everyday girls’ activist efforts without isolating their political actions from their family and community contexts. I argue that mother-daughter relationships have been underexplored in girls’ studies, and I interrogate how girls’ roles as daughters inform their political worldviews to explore the connections between the personal and political in girls’ lives. I analyzed the mother-daughter interviews through feminist affect theory and an adapted psychosocial model to gain a deeper understanding of not only what politicized girls and their mothers are doing, but also how their thoughts, feelings, and desires inform and resonate through these actions. The personal and political emerged as so intertwined that both mothers and daughters emphasized their early relationships with family members when narrating their stories of developing their activist and feminist consciousness. Whether these relationships served as positive or negative examples, they were still significant in shaping how the mothers and daughters situated their identities as feminists and activists. As the participants worked towards what they saw as an ideal (or at least possible) future, they had to negotiate what strategies, identities, relationships, and ideologies from their past and present that they wanted to reject and carry forward. Both mothers and daughters are in a constant state of becoming, where they never reach a finalized identity, political stance, or relationship dynamic. The mothers were no firmer in their beliefs than their daughters, and they were just as immersed in the process of figuring out how to navigate the world. This process of negotiation does not end with childhood and, in fact, girlhood persists.