In a culture that discounts the contributions of teenage girls yet rips them at will, co-opting their keen fashion sense into one that is marketable and desirable, Illuminati Girl Gang (IGG), a print and online journal of girl culture featuring work by kids who are mostly under the age of 25, comes as a welcome contribution to retaining the authenticity of adolescent expression. It offers up a space for girls to share their overflowing emotions, astute visual imagery, and not-so-covert sexual desires. This is the third issue of this publication; editor Gabby Gabby dedicates it to the reunion of Destiny’s Child. To begin the discussion of this publication, I would like to examine the underbelly of its essence: the girl who loves pink and all things feminine, and does not yet have in her mind the idea of gender as a social construct.
In Hannah Le Feuvre’s series included in the issue, we see a series of vintage photographs, including a birth certificate for Rosalind Jones, a woman who was once a baby, born December 4, 1953; an ultrasound, hospital bracelet, pink GIRL tag and a photograph of dad with his new daughter make up this quiet collage. The hospital brands us as girls from birth, awarding us pink rather than blue; we are girls from the beginning, according to the medical powers that be. Here, Le Feuvre remembers a feminine figure; it might be her mother, but it could just be a friend of the family or a complete stranger. If it’s the latter, this piece functions like the work of an adolescent Sophie Calle.
Read the full post on Hyperallergic: http://hyperallergic.com/66869/moments-of-female-adolescence-illuminated-online-and-in-print/
