Imagining womanhood: psychodynamic processes in the ‘textual’ and discursive formation of girls’ subjectivities and desires for the future

This article emerged in the course of a doctoral study that focused on the role of literary and filmic texts in constructing adolescent girls’ subjectivities and desires for womanhood. Analysing data drawn from both text and subject, the study focused on the discursive choreography of girls’ imaginary constructions of their mature adult selves. Aspects of the research data, however, were not so readily understood in terms of discourse, prompting the need for alternative explications of subjectification from a psychoanalytic perspective. Drawing on the recent work of Nancy Chodorow to analyse girls’ descriptions of their favourite texts and imagined futures, I demonstrate how subjectivity is a personal as well as cultural construction. Girls’ experience of themselves as gendered subjects is not simply a direct internalisation of stories and characters but a complex psychodynamic process whereby texts and other cultural and discursive phenomena are given emotional tonality and personal meaning. These person...