Girls, Style, and School Identities

Writing against the grain of popular perception and moral panic, Pomerantz offers an intricate look at the importance of style for girls in school. Based on a year long ethnography in a Canadian high school, Pomerantz highlights style as a meaning-making practice that demands to be taken seriously.

"Girls, Style, and School Identities is a welcome contribution to the growing field of Girl Studies. In making style the focus of her study, Pomerantz asks us (academics, journalists, teachers, and adults) to look again at what is central to girls lives but so often trivialized by those around them. When viewed through Pomerantz s ethnographic lens, style has much to tell us about girls cultural practices within global capitalism, their negotiation of school identities, and their vital quest for recognition and visibility." - Marnina Gonick, Canada Research Chair, Mount St Vincent University

"From Cultural Studies, to Girlhood Studies, to the emerging body of work on Dress Studies, with its careful attention to the nuances of gender, identity and school cultures, Pomerantz s new book makes critical contributions to understanding youth cultures. We ve had work on dressing the teacher and now we are ready for dressing the student ! It is one of the first books on dress and body to offer the kind of deep description and analysis that can only be gained through being there . The book is particularly rich in its theoretical location and will be of great value to scholars who see that value of taking interdisciplinary approaches." - Claudia Mitchell, James McGill Professor, McGill University and co-editor of Girl Culture; Seven Going on Seventeen; and Not Just Any Dress

SHAUNA POMERANTZ is Assistant Professor of Child& Youth Studies at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada.