Reclaiming joy in our Girlhood – Preserving our Spirit amidst the Chaos

I want to explore with you a little bit about how it was that the reclaiming of joy became a fundamental element of the work that we seek to do at Girlhood Reclaimed, and what it means to be to think about reclaiming joy in Girlhood.

In 2024 I started collecting data for my dissertation, which would look at how young women and girls understood their safety and safety work. As part of this, I delivered focus groups with girls in secondary and sixth from education. In these focus groups I introduced the participants to Liz Kelly’s concept of ‘safety work’. Liz Kelly is an expert, academic and activist within the field of violence against women, who conceptualized "safety work" as the work women and girls do to avoid, prevent, or dismiss violence. Kelly’s concept captures the invisible work that is performed by women and girls as acts that are routine and strategically decided to avoid the harm of sexual violence and sexual harassment[1]; acts that not only limit women and girls’ freedom but impact their feelings of safety, becoming embodied as part of their girlhood and womanhood.

In her 2018 study[2], Fiona Vera-Gray continued to explore safety work, interviewing 50 women aged 18–61 to reveal both the gendered nature of the women’s everyday experiences and the strategies employed to avoid and minimise experiences of sexual harassment. Both Liz Kelly and Fiona Vera Gray[3] capture the impact intrusive experiences of sexual harassment have on women throughout their lives. The combination of the fear and experience of sexual violence means that women ‘learn to adapt their behaviour and movements, habitually limiting their own freedom in order to prevent, avoid, ignore, and ultimately dismiss what they experience as ordinary’ (p. 271).

What I loved about using a concept like safety work to explore their experiences of safety was that the concept itself positions the young women and girls as social actors, rather than passive victims, it recognises the work that is being done to avoid and interrupt male intrusion. The focus groups also echoed traditional feminist consciousness-raising and connects with how collective consciousness-raising, where young women and girls can analyse their individual acts in the context of gender inequality, not only create an identification of the impact this has on their lives but engages with a growing understanding of sexual violence being a structural rather than personal problem[4].

Essentially, these focus groups provided a space that allowed for sense-making of their safety work, offering the young women and girls the opportunity to engage in feelings of resistance and empowerment that run counter to approaches where adults respond to their experiences of harm with victim blame, responsibilisation and risk management. Sense making spaces become a space where we can begin to undo the harm caused by gender-based violence, and the impact and harms of misogyny.

In creating contexts that are conducive to undoing harm, we create space for young women and girls to express their feelings in relation to what they are discussing. When talking about all the ways in which these young people experienced sexual harassment and misogyny within their day-to-day life at home, school, in public and online, themes emerged that highlighted how sexual violence and harassment felt like an inevitability within their lives. This felt compounded by their feeling that things were getting worse, and through witnessing the impunity of perpetrators.

Tiffany Bell and Ashley Hall (2022) argue that when underrepresented groups are given space to value their feelings as sources of knowledge, these emotions can become tools for critical reflection. They explore how rethinking teaching practices can serve as a form of self-care for Black women, helping them understand themselves and their relationships with others in a world shaped by anti-Blackness [5].

As I explored this more I began to connect reclaiming joy with what Tiffany Bell and Ashley Hall refer to as ‘an ethic of care’. When we invite in, or come alongside young people engaging in understanding the harms and impacts of social inequalities, like gender based violence, we also need to ensure that we cultivate expressions of joy as an act of care, as an act of resistance, sustaining us amongst these experiences and feelings that can leave such strong and overwhelming imprints on us, like that of sexual violence being an inevitability in our lives.

Reclaiming joy can therefore be seen as an act of self-care. Audre Lorde (1988)[6] was the first to explore self-care that reaches beyond the self, that is practised in solidarity with others who are oppressed and is, therefore, a collective act of political warfare. In taking a collective approach to joy, we nurture a collective approach to self-care that is not based on a consumerist, capitalist agenda, but instead holds a hope that young women and girls can access a form of empowerment that is sustainable, and places value on themselves and others.

So what does this actually look like though?

That’s something we hope to continue to explore at Girlhood Reclaimed, something we can do collaboratively with young women, girls and non-binary folk themselves. They are the sites of this embodied knowledge… how does joy show up for them? What does it look like to be joyfully themselves in a world where misogyny is so desperately trying to control the way girls, women and gender non-confirming folk show up in the world?

It is this collective approach that Audre Lorde talks about that I also think helps us to explore joy. When I think of movements like the #Metoo movement one element that is so incredible about it was the community and collective responses it created space for. Space was created to share our stories, and to feel and experience community with other women. I would suggest that joy in the formation of our femininity, however that looks for us, can be found in our shared and collective engagement in stories of joy. The reclaiming of joy through collective and communal storytelling counteracts a neoliberal, individualistic stance, and is a political act of self-care, that can help us in, as Tiffany Bell and Ashley Hall describe;

“Preserving our spirit amidst the chaos”

Where the concept of safety work offers sense-making and validation, joy offers hope and empowerment to collectively fight for femininity that is not defined by vulnerability but instead by our fullness as human beings.

[1] Kelly, L. (2012) ‘Standing the test of time? Reflections on the concept of the continuum of sexual violence’, in S. Walklate and J. Brown (eds) Handbook on sexual violence. London: Routledge., pp. xvii–xxvi.

[2] Vera-Gray, F. (2018) The right amount of panic: how women trade freedom for safety. Bristol: Policy Press.

[3] Vera-Gray, F. and Kelly, L. (2020) ‘Contested gendered space: public sexual harassment and women’s safety work’, International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, 44(4), pp. 265–275. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01924036.2020.1732435

[4] Mendes, K., Ringrose, J. and Keller, J. (2018) ‘#MeToo and the promise and pitfalls of challenging rape culture through digital feminist activism’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 25, pp. 236–246. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506818765318.

[5] Hall, A.R. and Bell, T.J. (2022) ‘The pedagogy of renewal: Black women, reclaiming joy, and self-care as praxis’, Journal of Communication Pedagogy, 6(1), p. 3.

[6] Lorde, A. (1988) A burst of light: essays. Ithaca, N. Y: Firebrand Books.