Girlhood Online

Dr. Will Kurlinkus

Literature Review
Continued
 Lit Reviews
§ Here’s the 2 key definitions, theories, or
lenses you need to know before we get
into my argument
§ Put these lenses in conversation with one
another, don’t isolate them
§ The lit review is an argument—It’s
important to understand how this and this
matter to my topic.
§ If I put these two or three things into
conversation with one another your
argument is popped out.
§ Ends by posing the gap or lit review
§ I don’t know why I’m reading this lit review—it should always be
directly related to your topic/thesis/argument.
§ I don’t need 5 surface level theories or a full review of everything
on your topic. I just need to know the lenses you’re going to use to
read your topic.
§ I’m talking about YouTube do I need a history of youtube
(maybe a sentence—probably not)
§ I’m talking about protest, do I need a summary of all that’s
been written on the rhetoric of protest (probably not—
maybe a sentence)
§ Theories like identity, performativity, gender, class, race, are
too big to do in a lit review. What approach are you taking to
them.
§ Don’t progress by author, progress by idea
§ Make sure you are giving examples to illustrate your theories and
connecting it back to your topic. No theory without illustration.
Ideally, your examples come from your topic.
§ TLDR: 3-4 paragraphs.
 § Get to this ASAP

§ Let your paper be driven by interesting examples and quotes from your primary sources.
They’re what are unique to you; they’re the most interesting thing; they’re always the
clearest way to illustrate your theory.

§ Pose questions and answer them. Make claims and prove them.

§ Make me understand your topic’s nuances as compared to the literature.

§ Don’t simply impose order from your lit review—let your subject and examples break your
tools and break your readers’ guessing machines.

§ Use citations that explain your subject in nuanced ways, not the other way around.

The Body of Your

Paper §

§
Too easy

Assuming that your claim is so clear it doesn’t need an example to substantiate it.

§ Assuming your example is so obvious that it doesn’t need analysis/theory applied to it.

§ Not differentiating your sections enough.

§ Not weaving your sections back together.

§ Having sections and claims that don’t answer your research question or prove your thesis.
Does this connect to my topic?

§ Not engaging your primary sources’ epistemologies but pasting them over with your own.
 § Point: The claim of your paragraph
§ Evidence:Your primary quotes that prove that claim.
§ Analysis: Showing how your evidence proves your point using both your own
words but also engaging secondary research. Proving but also complicating your
claim.

§ Point: One of the biggest reason rural adolescents go online is to escape feelings
of what I call “crowded isolation,” a simultaneous disconnect from one’s peers and
a constant surveillance and connection with one’s parents.

Point, Evidence, § Evidence: Kaycee, for example, describes how she lives 20 minutes from any of

Analysis
her friends. “I wish I had a car to drive into town and hang out at the gazebo,” she
stated in our interview, “But my parents won’t let me borrow their’s and even when
I get to I can only stay out an hour at a time because my mom says she doesn’t
want ‘them boys’ to get me. I think she means get me pregnant like my sister did.
So, mostly I just talk to my boyfriend on Snapchat where my mom can’t see it.”
§ Analysis: In this way, Kaycee’s body is constantly policed by her mother in ways
that her brother, Simon, a year older, is not. Simon, for instance, is allowed to hang
out at the football game until midnight whereas Kaycee must stay in constant text
contact and return home immediately after the football game. This gender gap,
which scholar Hermione Granger calls, “a generational constant—reinforced from
mother to daughter through forgotten memory,” has led to Kaycee to experiment
with her body online.
 Girlhood & Containment Rhetoric
§ Containment rhetoric aims to neutralize the threat of a
real or imagined “other” that in some way is seen as
challenging or endangering the status quo.

§ Adolescents must be contained their bodies are

simultaneously sexualized and restricted. They are
constantly overgrowing and bursting boundaries.

§ Q. What are ways we contain teenagers?

 Girlhood on Social Media
§ LaToya: active on twitter with friends, sharing all aspects of life, her
mom keeps her in the house so she doesn’t get in trouble. “I guess I can
be myself here instead” (2).
§ Painting the Gap: “While a variety of recent research focuses on social
media and some of this work considers US adolscents, our current
understandings of girls are both myopic and quixotic” (2). Rural gap too
§ Found young women seeking to escape containment, discrimination,
and stereotyping but finding these things reinscribed in new ways online.
§ How does society imagine the teenage girl internet user? Risky
and At Risk
§ Media migration: seeking spaces of less containment and more
opportunity. (make up your own terms)
 § Space/place is a technology and a medium through which
we interact. It makes some rhetorics likely and others
impossible (think of the sacredness of a memorial). It
shapes us and we are shaped by it.
§ Think—in what ways does considering the location of
your research topic transform it? What are the places in
which your topic exists?
§ Space and place mediatize our bodies: attending to
Space & Place space makes us aware of how our bodies rub up against
and react to it. Space often acts through affective rhetoric:
Theory “Embodied spatial memory is an agential and inventive
practice that says, “I feel good here,” without remembering
or knowing—at first, or at all—exactly why one has such a
feeling” (Kallin and Frith 229).
§ Space/place: Space is often the built environment and
place are the cultural practices that encode it.
§ Space & Place are palimpsestic
§ Key terms: space, place, third space, no place, out of place
(borders/boundaries, mapping, scale, ecological).
Region and Identity? What does it mean to be an Oklahoman?
• Defined by scales, tensions, and relationships across space and time rather than
any true fixed reality: “senses of place and region are not so much essential
qualities, imparted by singular events, practices, or topographical features, as
they are ongoing debates and discourses that coalesce around particular
geographical spaces” (14). What tensions and debates over identity define
Oklahoma? What does it mean to be an Oklahoman?
• When region is invoked it’s usually to make an argument about what we should
do, who belongs, who doesn’t (e.g., Oklahoma is oil—if you don’t support it,
you’re not Oklahoman. If you don’t eat meat, you’re not Oklahoman. If you
never…). What other containment rhetoric binds Oklahoman identity?

• Asks who has the power to choose what stories and memories define us as a
people (insider and outsider narratives)
• Regional memories are sometimes passkey memories (if you hold this
memory I know you’re really from here—are there any defining
memories that all Oklahoman’s have?)
• Outsider markers: The musical Oklahoma, Oklahoma city bombing, oil,
cowboys and indians, college football, wind
• Oklahoma State Meal: The official state meal of Oklahoma consists of
fried okra, cornbread, barbecue pork, squash, biscuits, sausage and
gravy, grits, corn, strawberries (state fruit), chicken fried steak, pecan
pie, and black-eyed peas.
• Atlas Obscura: https://www.atlasobscura.com/things-to-
do/oklahoma/places
What are space-based social media?
 § Crowded isolation: simultaneously
isolated but nowhere to go that’s private
§ Adolescence is constantly surveilled
§ Rural isolation: Talking while driving is
the only public/private third space
available for friends. Go walk down to
the cemetery.

Crowded § Physical and Social Isolation

(blocked and monitored--laws that

Isolation restrict teens movements) feels like a

failed identity. Not being someone.
§ What does it mean to be black in a
white rural town—social media
allowed LaToya to feel community.
§ Crowdedness: places filled with
people but not supportive peers, filled
with rules and regulations
 § Point: The claim of your paragraph
§ Evidence: Your primary quotes that prove that claim.
§ Analysis: Showing how your evidence proves your
point using both your own words but also engaging
secondary research. Proving but also complicating your
claim.

#OKBOOMER