The Extra-Ordinary Girl Under Neoliberalism, On and Off Screen: How Teen Girls in Toronto Negotiate Care, Connection, and Figurations of Girlhood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This work examines the extra-ordinary girl as she exists under neoliberalismm today. The extra-ordinary girl in this dissertation refers to the girl with a public presence who has great physical, mental and/or social power. Through a combination of qualitative research group interviews with teen girls in Toronto, and textual and cultural analyses of figurations of girlhood in popular culture, I emphasize the importance of listening to real teen girls whose perspectives and values might not match those attributed to dominant cultural models of girlhood. I explore contemporary girl figures and figurations of girlhood, on and off screen, highlighting how girls who are not in the public eye negotiate standards of exceptionality in relation to their own experiences of social power, while also defining the importance of care and connection to their relationships and personal values. \nKatniss from The Hunger Games and Sabrina from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina are two case examples within contemporary YA speculative fiction film and TV of an extra-ordinary teen girl protagonist. These two cases of the extra-ordinary girl the warrior-activist and the witch share some common traits rooted in an ethic of care. Moreover, these two character types are compelling for the ways they reflect social practices that real girls also engage in: activism and alternative spirituality. The fictional representations of extra-ordinary girlhood have a dialogic relationship with cultural-historical practices of girls who are visible activists, and with those who are increasingly interested in alternative spirituality. Both figures not only wield their exceptional power to effect social change, but they also become models for popular media to co-opt and appropriate into an extra-ordinary girl figure. \nFor the girls in my study, the extra-ordinariness of the characters, like the extraordinariness of the activist discussed in our sessions, is understood within the context of care and connection. While the girls I interviewed value relationships and community, their underlying feelings of needing to work on being braver and more confident reveal internalized neoliberal messages. In my analysis of coming of age and figurations of extra-ordinary girlhood, I illuminate the complexity of care under neoliberalism for the teen girl today.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".