The Girl Museum: The World's Only Museum About Girls

It's been heartening to see so much interest in girlhood lately. The 'Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls' conference call for papers had a massive response from scholars around the world to the point where the event will be larger than we anticipated, even when trying to restrain its size as much as we can. It will be intriguing to see what the blend of literature scholars, cultural historians, art historians, garden variety historians and even anthropologists will produce.

In the course of organising the conference, I was alerted to the existence of the Girl Museum, which will now contribute to an exciting (and, as yet, secret) event at the conference that will relate to our theme. The virtual museum resembles a traditional museum in that, alongside research, it focuses on preparing exhibitions. Visitors can browse exhibitions on Girlhood in Art (currently featuring Girl Saints and Across Time and Space, a collection of images of girlhood from the beginnings of civilisation) and the Art of Girlhood (which concentrates on material culture, and at present reveals the fascinating customs associated with Hina Matsuri- Girls' Day- in Japan).

These more traditional exhibitions are complemented with unique ways of representing contemporary girlhood. For instance, the Girl for Sale exhibit examines the disturbing subject of trafficking in girls, combining poetry, some written by survivors of trafficking, historical and contemporary art images, and resources for learning more about the facts of trafficking. In its collaborative, interactive spaces at the moment you will find the Heroines Quilt, composed of images of 31 diverse girlhood heroines submitted by members of the public (each was accompanied by a short essay on the Girl Museum's blog), and Becoming Girl, which collects together visual art by Chaya Avramov (complete with an article from the Museum curators that gives a Deleuzian perspective on the Museum and its work).

More news about the collaboration with this unique site soon!

Productless Girls are Pornographic

The controversy surrounding a photographic exhibition by an Australian artist has revealed a disturbing aspect of the way girls are regarded in contemporary culture. Bill Henson is renowned internationally for his photography, and is particularly known for his images of adolescent bodies. This is not the first time that he has exhibited work that features "children" unclothed. Yet this is the first time that the idea of obscenity charges have been raised and whipped the nation into a tut-tutting frenzy. It is also the first time that an Australian Prime Minister has seen fit to make judgement on where the line between art and pornography is drawn. Kevin Rudd did not simply suggest that we must tread carefully when exhibiting images of underage girls, but declared that the photographs in Henson's present--and now censored-- exhibition are "revolting".

Henson's current works are not new in their subject matter. What then has provoked this random outrage? Is it perhaps our own guilt at the overt sexualisation of girls projecting sex into every naked image we see? I heard discussion on talkback radio last week that called for footage of babies and toddlers scampering about on lambswool rugs in TV advertisements for nappies to be scrapped because paedophiles could find the content arousing. If every nude image of a child is viewed from within a context of paedophilic fear then we inadvertantly sexualise children ourselves. Of course the internet has allowed the worldwide trade of paedophilic images, to the horror of us all, but we adopt indiscriminate moral outrage and paranoia in return. This may be entirely understandable if it was not for the competing, accepted representation of highly sexualised girls and young women in men's magazines, pornography and advertising generally.

On the one hand, we can find dozens of DVDs and magazines in chain sexshops with titles like Barely Legal that play up the youth of the girls featured for the excitement of what we would define as "normal" heterosexual men, but when an artist features a non-sexualised naked girl in the context of an exhibition we culturally define it as paedophilic fodder. A girl bending over in a schoolgirl's uniform displaying her genitalia is an accepted, although X-rated, cultural norm. A naked girl's body when photographed for display in a gallery, however, is "un-Australian" according to Australia's opposition leader, Dr Brendan Nelson. Does a year or two difference in a girl's age really explain why sexy "barely legal" girls are ok, but a basic artistic nude is not? Perhaps we need to invest in some strategically-placed fig leaves?