Girls, Style, and School Identities

Writing against the grain of popular perception and moral panic, Shauna Pomerantz offers a fascinating look at the importance of style for girls in school. Fighting assumptions that girls today are dupes of media and capitalism, Pomerantz skillfully argues that style is a significant cultural practice that demands to be taken seriously in the lives of girls. By exploring style as social skin or a necessary condition of subjectivity, Pomerantz is able to get to the heart of the way girls negotiate a recognizable identity for themselves. Based on a year long ethnography at an urban, multicultural high school in Vancouver's east side, Pomerantz contextualizes style as a form of expression that enables girls to produce fluid and multiple identities, social networks, individual images, expressions of agency and power, and cultural affiliations.