“Mean Girls”

I chose to read Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High because of my interest in its psychological approach to literacy. Surprisingly, the girls in my book club seemed to have chosen it for similar reasons…and it wasn’t long before our “book discussion” broke out into  full-fledged story time as we reminisced about our own lives as young, teen girls stuck between adolescence and adulthood.
The social roles that Finders discusses in her book bring back so many memories of the rigid guidelines that teens must follow in order to simply “fit in.” These rigid and ultimately harsh guidelines stay with some girls for their entire lives — or do they stay with all of us? Excuse my ranting but is it not true that as women we still sometimes disregard morality when judging other women? Do we not use these rigid guidelines that originated in junior high to create our own ‘cliques’ and judgments about those that are not ours? Who knows…but as far as social roles and literacy goes, Finders states that “…roles represent multiple and shifting selves,”(9) and I can clearly remember using different types of literacy in order to fit in with my different social groups in junior high: with my basketball team I would use sarcasm and dry humor, my yearbook class was a place where I was comfortable being a quirky nerd and using more low comedy type literacy. I had my group of friends who were the more stereotypical “popular” girls who I would engage in the latest, juiciest gossip with and then there was my best friend, who had seen all sides and literacies of me and didn’t fall into any one of these social groups. While I believed that all of these friendships were genuine and going to last forever, my very best friends that have been around since day one of elementary school were the only ones who have actually made it this far.
All in all, what I’ve taken from our book so far is that the literacy practices that you engage in within social groups during your adolescent years effect much more than you may think. Before reading this I had almost forgotten what it was like to be a girl in junior high, and I realized how many privileges I take for granted now that I would have DIED for back then: freedom from my parents, the ability to drive a car wherever and whenever I please, no curfew, co-ed sleepovers, the list goes on and on. Finders points out to us that junior high is a time of drastic change from adolescence into the ‘real world’…and their ability to make the transition into adulthood lies partially in the literacy practices that they partake in.