“…more kind of caring to others and looking out for themselves at the same time”: Methodological Issues in an Investigation of Adolescent Girls’ ‘Envisionings’ of Motherhood

Abstract

This paper emerges in the course of a doctoral study which explores the role of cultural texts (those found in both curriculum and popular culture) in the construction of adolescent girls’ ‘envisionings’ of womanhood. The paper offers a feminist post-structuralist/psychoanalytic approach to the analysis of one curriculum text and proceeds with a discourse analysis of three girls’ responses to this text. The analysis reveals that the text serves to reinforce the girls’ situatedness within discursive spaces that resonate with notions that are potentially ‘mother blaming’. Most importantly, however, the analysis exemplifies that, whilst text analysis and discourse analysis are two distinct modalities, they can be synthesised to produce an insightful depiction of the textual construction of girls’ subjectivities.