Girlspeak

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Hilevaara, Katja. 2025. Girlspeak. In: Julieanna Preston and Anna Brown, eds. Performing Punctuation. Bristol: Intellect. [Book Section] (Forthcoming)

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Hilevaara manuscript 6 March jp.docx.pdf - Accepted Version
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Abstract or Description

This piece stages an interspecies (bird-human) conversation between a charm of winged female creatures. The conversation is composed of fragments blending speculative fiction, quotes and birdsong; mimicking adolescent girls’ prattle, and foregrounding this ‘girlspeak’ as a radical strategy to help us question patriarchal rules, like grammar, and fixed ideas on how children, particularly girls, should be brought up. I suggest we urgently listen to how our girls talk to engage with their deteriorating mental health and growing rates of suicide. I hope to also propose girlspeak as a radical strategy to harness alternative approaches to the patriarchal system’s impasse that is failing to act in the face of the current ecological crisis. The punctuation in this piece performs through the semicolon. It is put to work as a writing device that enables this conversation on the page. Though each of the ideas and voices that take part in this conversation could be written about in isolation, they are complete (as complete as ideas ever are) in their own right. By bringing them together the thinking multiplies, becomes entangled and folds outwards.

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Book Section