This book examines how the fairy tale is currently being redeployed and revised on the contemporary teen screen. The author redeploys Victor Turner’s work on liminality for a feminist agenda, providing a new and productive method for thinking about girlhood onscreen. While many studies of teenagehood and teen film briefly invoke Turner’s concept, it remains an underdeveloped framework for thinking about youth onscreen. The book’s broad scope across teen media—including film, television, and online media—contributes to the need for contemporary analysis and theorisation of our multimedia cultural climate.

This study of twenty first century girlhoods and womanhoods charts a new area of scholarship on Kenya. The chapters investigate questions related to how new rituals of girlhood and womanhood that materialize when religious, indigenous, and foreign worlds encounter each other are re-structuring family and society, recasting roles, and informing fresh conceptualizations of African girlhood and womanhood. The author’s interdisciplinary analysis and writing journeys through the different stages of girlhood and womanhood as ritualized by Kenya’s 21st century middle class, and teases out the implications of these peculiarities to identity (re)creation and the restructuring of societies’ organs, and traditionally gendered institutions. Applying a critical African studies lens, the arguments in this book center women as originators of action and thought without inquiring into a male other. Essentially, this work disrupts patri-centered constructions and examinations of female bodies and identities. The resulting deductions inform on the substratum of Kenyan girls and women’s self-definitions as manifest through their experiences and ritualized practices, and articulate the impact of the performances of these bodies and identities on Kenyan and global societies.

Power of Rituals for women is the go-to for turning ordinary events and occasions into extraordinary memorable experiences.This book is written for women who want to: Connect with each other in inspiring ways.

Trick-or-treating. Flower girls. Bedtime stories. Bar and bat mitvah. In a nation of increasing ethnic, familial, and technological complexity, the patterns of children's lives both persist and evolve. This book considers how such events shape identity and transmit cultural norms, asking such questions as: * How do immigrant families negotiate between old traditions and new? * What does it mean when children engage in ritual insults and sick jokes? * How does playing with dolls reflect and construct feelings of racial identity? * Whatever happened to the practice of going to the Saturday matinee to see a Western? * What does it mean for a child to be (in the words of one bride) "flower-girl material"? How does that role cement a girl's bond to her family and initiate her into society? * What is the function of masks and costumes, and why do children yearn for these accoutrements of disguise? Rituals and Patterns in Children's Lives suggests the manifold ways in which America's children come to know their society and themselves.

This text provides the author's word pictures of women dancing, chanting and moving through rituals that honour womanhood. She shares spiritual insights and teaches women how to plan unique rituals that enhance pride and pleasure in womanhood.

Girls get to voice their concerns and tell what life is like for them in this collection. From coming-of-age rituals in South Africa to the impact of computers and popular magazines on girls in Japan and Germany, this book offers a look at girl culture and girlhood from around the world. 1998.