Beauty, Breasts, and Brains: An Exploration of Using the Adolescent Female Body as a Resistance Site

Adolescent girls are continuously barraged with messages regarding what it means to be a girl and the appropriate way in which to do so. Particularly within the South, there are strict boundaries for acceptable forms of femininity both within school and in the broader social context. However, within the walls of the classroom, these lived experiences of girls are often ignored. By ignoring the lived experiences of girls in schools, many girls are being marginalized, trivialized, and dismissed from the school environment. This dissertation examines the hidden curriculum as it applies to adolescent girls in schools today and offers a framework within which I can identify my own experiences as a marginalized female adolescent in the school environment and explores new ways in which educators can include the changing female adolescent body within the school. Through exploring my own autobiographical roots, this work is placed in context of a larger group of adolescent girls within the South struggling with identity development in schools today. Due to the limited access to power and voice girls are granted by their position within the school and society, they often use their bodies as a way to rebel against patriarchal and societal norms. I seek to offer conclusions in the form of a new way to think about curriculum as a bodied text so that curriculum workers, teachers, mothers, and girls themselves may create and find spaces for resistance and new and powerful discourse related to their bodies.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Education in Curriculum Studies (Ed.D.)

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation (open access)

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Department of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading

Year dc:date.available

2010

Author dc:creator

• Beall, Hanna Andrews

Contributors dc:contributor

• Bob Lake
• Donald Livingston
• John Weaver

• ETD
• Hidden curriculum
• Education
• Adolescence
• Female
• Body

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/etd/525

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu:etd-1525