Becoming girl : the subversive narratives of Le girl sujet en process/on trial

This thesis poses the hypothetical question 'What is a girl' to three critical thinkers of postmodemity: Julia Kristeva, Donna Haraway and Gilles Deleuze and takes their triangulated determinations to prove that the figure of the girl as a trope is a powerful body of resistance in language and narrative.

Beginning with the feminist historical unravelling of the disavowal of the girl from woman, like Alice down the rabbit hole, the girl is exposed to the crashing waves of postfeminism and a narrative exile from the collective nouns of the sisterhood. Passing through the looking glass of Kristeva' s Women's Time, girl meets cyborg in an exposition of Donna Haraway's original figure of resistance and we discover that the word of Haraway's techo dreaming is made girl, with her colonization of cyberspace in a fleshed and integrated performative body.

The vicissitudes of time and space travel are rhizomically rectified by the decoding of Deleuze's principal work on the de and re-territorialisation of language and power: Becoming Woman, the Body without Organs, Facialisation, and Minor Literature, rendering the girl theoretically equipped to take on the symbolic order with seismic semiotic eruptions. Just how the girl crafts her narratives of resistance constitutes the remainder of this work. With the theory now teased out into strands of knowing, the construction of the girl as a trope of knowledge is applied from the highbrow art world to the most frivolous representations of gendered becoming present in popular culture.

The frightening abjection of the girl is shown in an analysis of Bill Henson' s controversial photographic exhibition depicting the naked form of 12 year old girl 'N', clearly articulating the biblical prohibitions triggered by the powerful sexual figure of the girl. From the crux of the girl, we segue to her applications as a mode of being when the sign of the girl is applied to some notorious girls about town: the Girls of the Playboy Mansion, girls no better than they should be using the sign to quell the moral panics of sex and sin, and Generation X dressed up as Y - Madonna and Cyndi Lauper analysed through the rubric of the girl power of their queer morphology and maternal bodies. Spent at the conclusion of this journey of epoch proportions, there is a triumphant satisfaction in the mettle of the girl being put under glass, only to evade categorisation, to disrupt language and the law of the temple, and, without the inbuilt redundancy of Haraway's cyborg, offer genuine millennial hope that becoming girl is the antidote to the limitations of the symbolic order.